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The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 1,000 points before trimming its drop and ended down 347.80 points, or 3.2 percent, at 10,520.32. About $700 billion of U.S. stock- market value was wiped out in less than 10 minutes, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Nasdaq, which investigated trades between 2:40 p.m. and 3 p.m., said it didn’t find any technology or system issues that caused declines of as much as 99.9 percent in some shares. Citigroup Inc. may have been the firm that made an erroneous trade, CNBC said, citing “multiple sources.” New York-based Citigroup said it found “no evidence” of erroneous trades, and CME Group Inc. said the bank’s activity in CME stock index futures didn’t appear to be “irregular or unusual.”

“Somebody hits the wrong button and everybody heads through the same door at the same time,” said David Goerz, who oversees $17 billion as chief investment officer at Highmark Capital Management in San Francisco. “It clearly was a factor. When you have a lot of skepticism and nervousness in the market place, that just exacerbates the problem.”

90 Percent

Accenture Plc and Exelon Corp. were on Nasdaq’s list of companies and dropped more than 60 percent as U.S. equities tumbled, before recovering by the close. The list also included some bearish exchange-traded funds that surged as stocks fell.

The decision means that trades in Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co., which slid as much as 37 percent for the biggest intraday drop in the Dow industrials, would stand. The world’s largest consumer products company said stock trades that pushed its shares down were probably an error.

Philip Morris International Inc. of New York, which sank as much as 96 percent to $2, also wasn’t included on the list of companies whose trades would be canceled.

Accenture, the second-biggest technology consulting company, fell more than 99 percent to a penny. All trades executed below $17.74 have been canceled, Bloomberg data showed. The stock closed down 2.6 percent at $41.09.

On CNBC’s May 6 “Closing Bell,” correspondent Matt Nesto explained that investigators for both the stock exchanges and for Citigroup, the firm that some are pointing fingers at for a so-called trader error, have narrowed it down to a futures index called the E-mini S&P 500.

“A person familiar with the Citi investigation said one focus of the trading probes were the futures contracts tied to the S&P 500 stock index known as the E-mini S&P 500 futures and in particular that two-minute window in which 16 billion of the futures were sold,” Nesto said. “Again, those sources are telling us that Citigroup’s total E-mini volume for the entire day was only 9 billion, suggesting that the origin of the trades was elsewhere.”

Nesto named eight stocks that were hit with the supposed computer error/bad trade, if that’s indeed what happened, that went all the way down to zero or one cent, including Exelon (NYSE:EXC), Accenture (NYSE:ACN), CenterPoint Energy (NYSE:CNP), Eagle Material (NYSE:EXP), Genpact Ltd (G), ITC Holdings (NYSE:ITC), Brown & Brown (NYSE:BRO), Casey’s General (NASDAQ:CASY) and Boston Beer (NYSE:SAM)

“Now according to someone else close to Citigroup’s own probe of the situation, the E-Minis trade on the CME,” Nesto continued. “Now Maria, I want to add something else just in terms of these erroneous trades that Duncan Niederauer, the NYSE CEO was just talking about. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about Accenture, ACN. This is a Dublin-based company. It’s not in any of the indexes. If you look in the S&P 500, for example, I show at least two stocks that traded to zero or one cent – Exelon and CenterPoint. If you look in the Russell 1,000, I show Eagle Materials, Genpact, ITC and Brown & Brown, also trading to zero or a penny, and also Casey’s General Stores, as well as Boston Beer trading today, intraday, to zero or a penny. So those have at least eight names that they’re going to have to track down on top of the Accenture trade, where we have the stock price intraday showing us at least, we’ll assume, a bogus trade of zero.”

Nesto calling these trades “bogus” drew backlash from the host and CNBC veteran Maria Bartiromo, who said those trades sounded like “market manipulation” to her.

“ That is ridiculous,” Bartiromo replied. “I mean this really sounds like market manipulation to me. This is outrageous.”

According to Nesto, these are frequent occurrences, at least at the NASDAQ exchange and if you make a trade a lose money, there’s no recourse.