I believe that a large part of today's early morning debacle was created by people having stop loss orders in place. For example going into today if you owned 100,000 shares with a stop loss order to sell at 1.25 your brokerage house would comply with your wishes in selling the stock. But you did not get $1.25. You get whatever they could sell the stock for at your stop loss price or lower. Your fist sale would have been at the opening price and then your house would hit the bid price until your position was liquidated. Substantially below what you thought you had protected Stop loss orders are bad IMO Phockey