On its website, the ASIC said that on 24 May 2011 Merrill Lynch Global Wealth & Investment Management entered an order to sell 50 million ordinary shares in Future Corporation Australia at a price of A$0.002. At that time, GWIM was not aware of 1:10 reconstruction of the shares and as a result entered the order at A$0.002, instead of A$0.02. This led it to be priced 13 steps and 86.7 per cent lower than the highest bid in the market.

The order ended up with 13 transactions at prices from A$0.015 to A$0.002, resulting in an 86.7 per cent decrease in the price of FUTDA. Eleven of the transactions were then cancelled.

In March 2009, several changes were made to Merrill Lynch's systems which the company was not aware of. The changes enabled certain orders to be manually entered by GWIM and automatically routed to the Australian Stock Exchange without being reviewed by Merrill Lynch's trading desk.

This failure is a violation of ASIC market integrity rules, said ASIC, and Merrill Lynch was issued an infringement notice with a A$120,000 ($116,000) penalty.

Merrill Lynch cooperated during the ASIC investigation and did not dispute any material facts. It also committed to take further remedial action to prevent a recurrence of this incident.