The Work-From-Home Trader Who Shook Global Markets

On March 9, U.S. stocks had their biggest one-day point drop ever as the economic fallout from the novel coronavirus sank in. Within a week that record had been broken twice, only for the S&P 500 to register its greatest weekly gain in decades in April, after the Federal Reserve intervened by slashing interest rates and buying bonds.

This rattle of volatility arrives 10 years after another famously tumultuous episode in the markets—the so-called Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, when, without warning, the S&P 500 plummeted 5% in four minutes, temporarily erasing $1 trillion. The incident sparked a government investigation and led to questions about whether the rise of high-frequency trading was having a destabilizing impact on the markets. In the end, the U.S. Department of Justice focused on a different culprit: a 36-year-old day trader named Navinder Singh Sarao who operated out of his bedroom in his parents’ suburban semidetached house on the outskirts of London.