Slashdot Mirror
Computer Glitch Causes Havoc and Losses on Nasdaq
goombah99 writes "In an illustration of how fragile the electronic stock market system is the NY Times is reporting how a tiny computer glitch rippled through the Stock Markets with buyers who bought low and sold high taking huge losses. An erroneous large sell order was entered. Many people bought at this low price, then signed options contracts to sell these at higher prices, locking in a profit. Or so they thought utill the erroneous low sell order was removed. Now to honor their options they had to buy the stock at a higher price. Since exchanges trust each other's trade prices it rippled throughout the system. There does not seem to be any way to gracefully undo such errors."
That precedent is already there, for example NASDAQ's "clearly erroneous" rule.
Really this happens all the time and I don't know why this particular incident made /.
It was unusual to see the spread between buy and sell markets be more than a few cents. And with the software that let you see the position on NASDAQ and all the other order books simultaneously, that spread was getting even smaller.
So I find it puzzling that traders wouldn't realize something was amiss with a $20 spread on a stock. I'm sure they did realize it was amiss, and there was a strong possibility that NASDAQ would break the trade, but they figured they'd go ahead with the trade just in case they could make some money before it was broken. It was, they lost money, and now they're crying.
BTW: Somebody asked what NASDAQ's software runs on. Mostly they use Suns, although there are some Windows systems, and possibly some SGIs.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Unfortunately, people don't seem to understand the real problem here. The problem is that people make offsetting trades in other markets, that are built on other systems, to lock in profits in the primary market. This story was about traders who sold options contracts to lock in profits on the stock itself. The trades on the stocks were busted by NASDAQ, but the options trades can't be backed out of, they are in a separate market. Thus the trader gets fucked. Having a transactional rollback capability on the NASDAQ wouldn't help here, it would have to encompass all the other markets people might trade in.
Mind you, I would think there would be legal recourse here based on contract law. The buyer entered into an option sale contract with reasonable reliance on the NASDAQ's "promise" that they bought the stock at a low price. Promissory estoppel against the NASDAQ, or against Archipelago? I don't know, sounds to me like an interexchange issue that needs legal or regulatory collaboration more than it needs a technical solution.
The big companies that go public hope that an infusion of cash will make them more profitable, but it usually ends up that they get to take a break on stockholder's money for a while until it's deadline time again and they have to scramble to make product/service X work.
I've seen many types of correct critiques of the system, but this is just wrong. When a company receives money by issuing equity, they give up (through dilution of voting rights) partial control of the company. Management only authorizes stock issues when they expect to make money faster with the increased capital than their original equity could.
An IPO or follow-on offering brings in money, but it doesn't make the issuer "rich." If those accelerated earnings don't materialize, the company will be worth just as much as it was worth before, only now the original owners have a smaller stake.
Look at all the ads for investing these days. They all suggest that you trust them to make you money, and they have as selling points, how easy it is to make money.
I challenge you to produce evidence of this. This is strictly illegal. Read up on securities law my friend, and you will notice that the regulations on investment advertising is pretty severe. If you promise someone to make them money and can't deliver, you are in violation of the law.
The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 set out the general provisions, and the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) Advertising Rules have strict guidlines on what constitutes violations regarding investment advertising.
And even if somehow this ad got past the NASD, it wouldn't get past the SEC. If you learn anything about investing, learn that SEC Rule 10b-5 is your friend.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This is NASDAQ's "clearly erroneous" rule. I'm sure a Google search will turn up plenty. All serious players are aware of this rule.
When you as an individual do trades, you do them with a brokerage, not with nasdaq, no matter how transparent it looks, and liability in that case depends on your contract with your broker.
It's not their fault, and the contract should cover this.
On Oct 2 2002, someone at a brokerage firm Bear Stearns entered a 4 million dollar trade as a 4 billion dollar trade and it wasn't doublechecked and caused most market indices do go down about a half percent DURING NORMAL TRADING HOURS during the last hour of trading.
& cp 1=1
This was widely reported in the financial press, and eventually the sell position was unwound.
Since the order was a sell order tied to a diversified holding, it caused this decline to happen with both the electronic Nasdaq exchange and also the auction-based NYSE.
"In October of last year, for example, a trader at Bear Stearns mistakenly entered an order to sell $4 billion in stocks instead of $4 million. And two years ago London's stock market collapsed after one hapless trader entered an extra zero into a sell order."
See
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/945909.asp?0sl=-21
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2294525.stm
for more details
Previous errors
Mistakes have been made in market trading before by other companies.
In May last year, London's FTSE 100 index dropped by more than 2%, after a trader typed 300m, instead of 30m, while selling a parcel of shares.
In 1998 a Salomon Brothers trader mistakenly sold 850m-worth of French government bonds by LEANING ON HIS KEYBOARD.
And at the end of 2001, shares in Exodus, a bankrupt internet firm, jumped by 59,000% when a trader accidentally bid $100 for its shares, at a time when its value was 17 cents.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
I work for the company in question, and I assure you this is not the case. What basically happened is that the feature which would auto bail-out of a losing position which was in place for client X was discovered and used by client Y, who wasn't even supposed to know about it. Client Y added the setting to support autobail, but didn't include a lag time to send the orders.
Thus, the order was sent thousands of times before the error was noticed.
For it to have been malicious, the programmer would have had to have contact with the client in question, which is not the case. It was a multi-layered mistake, plain and simple.
Anyone that's done some control theory knows how to solve the problem --- just add some hysteresis into the feedback loop, ie. response delay in both directions.
:-)
All forms of instability are reduced in their effect by this means, so it doesn't matter whether the instability stems from human error, bugs, or system glitches arising from other things.
And exactly how would one do this? There's a ton of ways, and quite a few of them simply entail holding quoted prices steady for a mandated period, plus a few adornments.
There are much more creative ones around though which could probably work even better, like allowing only audio readouts in trading rooms so that info comes in slowly like in tickertape days, or the one I like best, allowing traders to use no equipment other than the morning's financial newspaper, plus a pen and notepad.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra