Fat Finger

Entry in progress—B.P.
 
Wiktionary: fat-finger
Alternative spellings
fat finger, fatfinger
Etymology
fat + finger, the implication being that a person who fat-fingers does so because his or her fingers are too fat to strike a key without accidentally simultaneously striking a neighboring key.
Verb
to fat-finger (third-person singular simple present fat-fingers, present participle fat-fingering, simple past and past participle fat-fingered)
(transitive) To make errors in typing on a keyboard or keypad by accidentally striking more than one key simultaneously with one finger.
1995 September 8, “US West software update disconnects online users”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Another Sprint employee speculated that someone might have fatfingered the keyboard.
2008, “DNS: Patched but not totally fixed”, TechRepublic, August 24: 
However the other day I fatfingered a web request and got a Charter Communicationsnot found result page
2010 May 06, Jennie Runevitch, “Source of stocks’ plunge investigated”, wthr.com, Indianapolis:
“Evidently, someone said they ‘fat-fingered’ a trade, meaning they accidentally put it in for billions instead of millions,” Snyder said.
 
Urban Dictionary
fat finger
May 7, 2010 Urban Word of the Day
verb, the act of performing a typo. Often used when referring to password typos. See Fat Finger Disease
“I thought the server was down, but I just fat fingered my password.”
“You didn’t get my email? I must have fat fingered the address.”
by Lord Andre Mar 31, 2005
 
Urban Dictionary
Fat Finger Disease
When you interface with any kind of computer that requires manual input (whether by keyboard, or a touchscreen) there is the chance for making a mistake. Such mistakes are playfully called “Fat Finger Disease”.
when using a touchscreen device, sometimes your finger makes a wrong choice; people who do so have Fat Finger Disease.
by Gene Bob Oct 23, 2004
 
Word Spy
fat finger dialing
n. A telephone scam in which a company sets up a toll number that is one digit different than a popular number, so that the company earns money when customers accidentally mis-dial the legitimate number; mis-dialing a phone number in this manner. Also: fat-finger dialing, fat fingers dialing.
(...)
Earliest Citation:
Joel Drizen noticed something didn’t look right on his phone bill, a four-minute collect call placed to him by his brother three miles away using what he thought was 1-800-COLLECT. The cost: over $16. A charge almost three times higher than he expected from a company he’d never heard of before, ASC Telecom.
 
After investigation, they realized that he dialed 1-800-COLLECT with three L’s as opposed to two L’s. ...
 
Mr. ROBERT TOLCHIN (Plaintiff’s Attorney): ASC is basing its entire business model on what they call fat fingers dialing. That means they’re going to take advantage of people who have fat fingers and mis-dial the telephone.
—Matt Lauer, “Mis-dialed collect call schemes,” The Today Show, April 4, 2002
     
HighBeam Research
Article: WHERE DOES THE ORDER GO? (Electronic vs. outcry stock transactions)
Article from: Futures (Cedar Falls, IA)
Article date: September 15, 2000
Author: Mosser, Mike
(...)
Salls says this is the reason many institutional traders prefer to avoid entering their own orders so they can avoid the fat finger syndrome of hitting the…
 
PM 
Market report
PM Archive - Wednesday, 16 May , 2001 00:00:00
Reporter: John Lombard
(...)
And finally the sad story of every trader’s nightmare - the ‘fat finger’ syndrome.
 
London’s market collapsed more than 200 points in the last minutes of trading earlier this week and the cause, it now turns out, was a trader punching in an extra zero in a sell order.
 
The hapless trader put in a 30 million pound sell order as 300 million pounds and it went straight through. Whoops and mercy- nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
 
Google Books
Introduction to Financial Technology
By Roy S. Freedman
Boston, MA: Academic Press
2006
Pg. 297:
Glitches similar to these are also termed fat finger syndrome, which blames bad orders on carless keyboard typing. (Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2005)
     
Reuters
“Fat finger” role in selloff likely a myth
* Dealers, investors have safeguards against “fat fingers”
* Trading systems require special approval for big trades
* If fat finger doesn’t exist then adds to selloff concern
By Dan Wilchins
NEW YORK, May 7 (Reuters) - The “fat finger” that supposedly triggered a scary U.S. market selloff on Thursday is likely just a myth.
 
Soon after the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 6 percent in 10 minutes, rumors abounded that a trader had sparked the rout by erroneously inputing a massive “sell” order—a mistake known as a “fat finger.”
 
But the rumors either lacked specifics or when the name of a firm was mentioned there was no trace of the “fat fingered” individual.
(...)
But fat fingers have created problems for banks in the past. In 2001, UBS mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of Japanese advertising giant Dentsu Inc at 16 yen per share, instead of selling 16 shares at 610,000 yen. In 1992, Salomon Brothers botched a customer order and shaved 15 points off the Dow Jones industrial average.