Dow Goes South

Remember 10 years ago when this was a concern that rivaled the Y2K glitch:

Programmers in the stock and securities industries, never anticipating the meteoric rise of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, have written some applications that support only four digits, experts said. If the Dow hits 10,000, and it was hovering at around 9,200 last week, certain automated trading operations might not work properly, they said.

"Trading organizations face massive exposure if the [Dow] passes 10,000 and their systems interpret it as 1,000 or 0,000," said analyst Andy Kyte in a Gartner Group report. "Computer-based trading systems could interpret the '10,000' event as a catastrophic crash."

Thank god we have nothing to worry about...