The Securities and Exchange Commission will host a one-day roundtable, “Technology and Trading: Promoting Stability in Today's Markets,” to discuss ways to promote stability in markets that rely on highly automated systems.

The discussion, which is open to the public, will be held at the Securities and Exchange Commission's Washington D.C.  headquarters on September 14, 2012 from 10 a.m. to approximately 4 p.m. It will also be webcast on the Commission's Web site.

The roundtable will consist of two panels. The morning panel will focus on error prevention, with technology experts discussing current best practices and practical constraints systems used to automatically generate and route orders, match trades, confirm transactions, and disseminate data. The afternoon panel will focus on the response to errors when they occur.

The roundtable was promised by SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro after trading errors by Knight Capital Group on Aug. 1 echoed the infamous “Flash Crash” of 2010. Knight Capital said problems at the open of trading at the NYSE were related to the installation of new trading software and a glitch that sent out a flurry of erroneous orders. The unwinding of those trades put the firm on the hook for a pre-tax loss of approximately $440 million.

Schapiro said the incident showed that recently-adopted circuit breakers did their job and halted trading on individual stocks that experienced significant price fluctuations, and “clearly defined rules” guided exchanges in determining which trades could be broken.