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A $251 Million Typo
theodp writes "A Taiwan stock trader is jobless after a typo left her company looking at a paper loss of more than $12 million when what was supposed to have been a small order mistakenly resulted in a $251 million purchase. 'Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors,' a company exec explained."
The cnet article claims the company plans to keep the shares.
Not so. Here's the official press release.
Fubon Securities settles stock trading error in timely fashion.
Under the fundamental principle of not affecting the local stock market, Fubon Securities today smoothly unloaded all NT$7.7 billion worth of shares it mistakenly purchased yesterday for a client by inadvertently keying in an incorrect figure, with its own dealer department absorbing some NT$5 billion worth of the shares unloaded. The company will properly adjust its shareholding positions based on market conditions.
Fubon Securities said that immediately after the undesirable error occurred, the company activated its crisis management system and sold off NT$800 million worth of shares yesterday. The firms crisis-handling panel, under the principle of minimizing any possible impact on the local bourse, smoothly unloaded all remaining positions in mistakenly purchased shares today, with some NT$5 billion worth of stock certificates in 230 issues taken over by the firms own dealer department. Judging from todays performance in the local stock market, the massive corrective operation did not in any way have negative impact on the bourse.
As investors are concerned about the impact of this event on the earnings performances of both Fubon Securities and Fubon Financial, Fubon Securities reports that total losses ensuing from the stock-unloading operation did not exceed NT$470 million and were equivalent to the firms total pretax earnings recorded in the first five months of the year. If including the increased earnings in June caused by an upturn in stock turnover, Fubon Securities earnings for the first half of the year will still surpass those of some other local brokerage houses. The firm is still guardedly optimistic about its overall earnings record for the full year, based on prospects for the economy in the second half of the year.
Of course, all those numbers are in Taiwan dollars...
I just feel sorry for the woman who lost her job because some idiot forgot to make a big, red "WARNING" page in software that important.
Where is clippy when you need him?! "Hi, it looks like your trying to buy a quarter billion dollars of stock! Can I help? I suggest MSFT instead."
OK Cancel dialog boxes are bad. They are only used because some OS and platform vendors made them easy, and most programmers are too lazy or unaware of interface design to do it correctly. Any decent desktop platform should make the call:
dialogbox(introduction, button1text, [button2text, [button3text, [...]]])
The platform decides the height and width of the dialogbox and the buttons based on the contents. Button placement is decided by the button texts: if several button texts are short, they are placed in a horizontal row. Return value is the number of the button pushed.
This makes the platform simpler with only one dialogbox function for any number of buttons. It encourages developers to make the buttons meaningful. And consumers read the buttons rather than "click OK" because every dialogbox is different.
Bad:
Are you certain you want to give away $1 million?
[OK] [Cancel]
Good:
[Give away $1 million]
[Let me try something else]
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
When you want to do something very stupid in Debinan with apt-get in kindly asks:
If you want to continue please enter: "Yes, I want to totally wreck my system now."
You have to type the whole sentence and then you're system get's hosed. Otherwise it cancels the requested action.
You obviously haven't worked with a trading front end systems before.
When the market can change rapidly in a few seconds, trading systems are usually designed so that the dealers can enter orders as quick as they can. That means you don't get those annoying pop-up confirmation message boxes like WinXP SP2.
At amazon you can reverse your order at any time. You can even still reverse it when you have received the item already (probably minus shipping charges).
Don't bother, you'll be visiting http://66.184.142.51/ within a week.
I am trolling