Japanese i-bank suffers huge losses due to technical glitch

At a time when brokers are struggling with dwindling trading volumes, a large Japanese investment bank's trading desk had to suffer huge losses recently due to a ' technical glitch'.

According to market sources, the firm's trading system recently executed a fictitious 'sell' order that was initially entered by software programmers to test a trading system.

Due to an error in the software, the order for the stock, which carried a large notional loss as it was bought at a higher price, moved into the live trading system and got executed at a much lower price.

The error has led to the broker incurring losses worth over $10 million, the sources said.