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April Fools Sees Fake Extra Millions For Users of Brokerage Site
Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake. Users logged on to find larger balances than they should have, sometimes millions of dollars extra, and many of those users started trading with the nonexistent money. Happy April Fool's Day. "... when Zecco realized it, the company apparently started to force sell, even at a loss, charging the losses to the customers along with a '$19.99 broker-assisted trading fee.' Oops."
the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor. - Dr. Zoidberg
Sig this!
It's like a performance art piece about our worm-riddled crony capitalist mess!
Quit making excuses guys, and head on down to the gallery...
Conficker? Or just some programmers/administrator's Easter Egg?
Seriously. I thought all financial institutions had given up on using Perl for their back-end systems. One misplaced _$ and suddenly everyone is swimming in money.
Next time use a strict typing language like Haskell.
I'm guessing some coke-head in marketing/sales dreamed this one up to get free press about the site. Nobody in IT or Finance would conceive of a "joke" so stupid.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The mountain is high, the valley is low
And you're confused 'bout which way to go
So I flew here to give you a hand
And lead you into the promised land
So, come on and take a free ride (free ride)
Come on and take it by my side
Come on and take a free ride
I logged in to Zecco 4/1 at around 9:30 AM... my cash-on-hand was off by about $1.6 MM (balance was 1.8 MM instead of 0.2 MM). I immediately instructed Zecco to wire me the excess funds... and the funds hit my bank account at 12:02 PM!
As of today, the money is still in my account, but there is a hold on it. Apparently, the funds transfer was initiated properly, fully authorized... so my bank is holding the funds while I accrue interest on it until they determine final disposition.
Oh hell, who am I kidding... I don't have 0.2 MM in an online investment account. Hell, I don't think I have 0.2 MM is assets, unless you include my wife & daughter, who I could probably sell for that much if I found a good buyer or if there was a bidding war.
Oops... was that my out-loud voice?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
use strict;
TFA and the summary both state that the broker "started to force sell, even at a loss, charging the losses to the customers". However, they are silent on what happened to those who were ahead on their trades. Did they get to keep the profits?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Let me see if I get this straight (understanding that the summary has a typo and should read they shouldn't have on the second statement. Or, and this is the link to the consumerist story.
You log in your account and find a huge sum of money in their. Or, I hit the jackpot you think. Now you go and start using it for trade. TFA is a bit lightly on the details, but looks like this trades were go, meaning basically, market fraud. Not, to add some salt on all this, they go out to reverse the money, sell the stocks people bought at a loss, charge than the loss and ask for a commission??? I see lawsuits coming from so many points it gets ridicule.
From the consumerist post: "west: ummmm, this is ridiculous. so i thought it was an april fools joke, put in an order for SKF, and it went through then Zecco just sold it â"-- more than likely making me take the loss please let me know if any of you experienced this! lol....and they charged me $19.99 for commission". So basically they did an April's fool joke, it went wrong, and they are trying to make people pay for their mistake.
Impressive. They do get credits because you need a lot of balls to joke with the market after all it went through recently. And no, I don't buy the "honest mistake" line.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
First of all, it obviously WAS an honest mistake. Even if they millions showing up as "buying power" were intended as a joke, the fact that the system allowed them to be used for actual purchases, most certainly was a mistake.
Now, when you have a brokerage account and are trading stocks, you should know what you are doing and be responsible for your actions. So, when you see several million in you account, you should know as much to not start investing them. If it is not your money, at best it will be considered a margin trade which has to abide to SEC mandated rules. IIRC on a margin trade you have to have equity worth 25% (or whatever the figure is) of the security that you acquired on margin. Otherwise the broker has to automatically sell to cover. If you don't know things like that, you should not be trading at the stock market.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I appreciate a good Perl joke as well as the next Perl hacker, but if you wedge a "_$" into your code you'll just get syntax errors. Did you mean "$_"? That error (misplaced default parameter) I've seen quite often, mostly among Perl nubs.
I can't comment on the frequency or trend of Perl back-end systems. Most back-end systems I've worked with are J2EE.
Your ideas on type-safety are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Hahaha, surely, thou art on the highway to Hell.
Ducketh thou, the swine that thou hast cast your perl before will rise up and smiteth thee.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Screw ups like this is why I insist that all financial institutions that I have business with send me paper statements.
Nonsense. Mistakes can happen on the other 364 days, but on April 1st they are all purposeful pranks!
...people aren't that stupid.
More likely many of them realized "Hey, this could be an aprils fool or then not. I don't know. I could check it and get confirmation oooor.... I could act as if it wasn't and sue the hell out of them if this is!"
While nobody should be stupid enough to fall into that joke for too long, no organization should be stupid enough to make jokes with large sums of money.
... if a ridiculously large amount of money shows up unexpectedly in your bank account, rushing out to spend it wildly before the mistake can be caught is not actually the smartest of the available options. The authorities look disapprovingly on such activities.
Life needs more saving throws.
Whooosh!
Whooosh!
Whooosh!
Whooosh!
A whole flock of them went right over your head. Check for droppings.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It's true, we're doomed, I tell you!!!
*reaches for tinfoil hat*
More seriously, original post is here. They're claiming it was a mistake in a feed...
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ca37sl
An abstract...
"The surge in "Buying Power" was an accidental extension of credit to the customers' accounts. Actual funds were not deposited therein. After the error was discovered, the mistaken credit was withdrawn. However, not before some executed trades on the lines of credit, including including one guy who bought over $1 million in shares. The company then acted to reverse the errors, saying on their blog, "Except in a very small number of egregious and fraudulent cases, customers will not be responsible for losses (or gains) incurred for trades in excess of their buying power."
Wonder how they define "egregious and fraudulent"?
*removes tinfoil hat, reaches for lawyer*
Are you illiterate? From the summary: Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake (emphasis mine).
From the linked "article": Consumerist has updated their post with a message from Zecco claiming that it was not an April Fool's joke,...
And from the "real" article that is linked from there: Online brokerage site Zecco accidentally increased 1% of their customers' Buying Power balances by millions on April 1st, leading some customers to wonder whether it was a system glitch or some horrible April Fool's joke. It turned out to be the former.
And from Zecco itself: "Additionally, we want to make it clear that contrary to some reports, this was not in any way intentional and was not an April Fool's joke. We take the integrity of our customers' accounts very seriously and we have taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."
Whether or not you believe Zecco is a different matter, but the only thing pointing towards it being an April Fool's joke is speculation, and this is flatly contradicted by the claims of Zecco, and the summary somewhat accurately conveys this.
None of this was intentional. FTA:
"Update: Consumerist has updated their post with a message from Zecco claiming that it was not an April Fool's joke, but noting "Some clients may experience incorrect display of Buying Power and Account Balances." It's not entirely clear how those "incorrect displays" were apparently off by millions in some cases."
It was indeed a Perl joke and it's been too long since I've programmed in it to remember that $_ was the correct sintax. I mean syntax. I guess I'm still in the category of "Perl nubs".
If a large amount of money shows up in your bank account, and you have no idea how it got there, spending it WILL land you in jail if you withdraw the money and hide it or blow it.
This is the case even if you ask the teller if the money is yours and he/she says yes. Once they figure out the truth, they WILL hold you responsible for the cash.
I see no difference between that and this case. These folks knew they did not actually have an account worth millions, yet they bought stock based on money they did not have. Gee, what did they think was going to happen; of COURSE the broker is going to get their cash back ASAP.
If I was the broker, I would waive the trading fees for selling your shares, but would hold the account holder responsible for any losses. Maybe, in a goodwill gesture, sign over the gains (if any) also, but that would be the limit of my generosity.
SirWired
I think they'd be better off claiming that it WAS a prank even if it wasn't. If I was their customer I might have more understanding for an April's fool joke that went bad (assuming appropriate people are fired) than for the fact that their system is so flawed that customer's balances were off by millions of dollars by mistake.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
... if a ridiculously large amount of money shows up unexpectedly in your bank account, rushing out to spend it wildly before the mistake can be caught is not actually the smartest of the available options
The smartest thing to do is take it all out as cash, convert it into gold bars, then disappear.
Deleted
""Except in a very small number of egregious and fraudulent cases, customers will not be responsible for losses (or gains) incurred for trades in excess of their buying power.""
-No fraud was perpetrated. The customer had no influence on what funds were available and how much they got.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Translation into modern English: "Ducks you, the swine that you have cast your perl before will rise up and smites you." Yes, I am such a pedant, I will critique your usage of outdated English.
SSC
I'd prefer my brokerage be honest, regardless of how their customers treat them when receiving bad news.
If you have no clear record as to how you acquired the excess funding, then you are not entitled to use it. If money is ACH'd into your checking account due to a transposition of digits, you do not get to spend the money as you see fit. It is your responsibility to contact your financial institution to notify them of the error. If you spend the money in bad faith (knowing that you should not have received it), the police will come knocking when it is discovered.
There was no change in anyone's balance, 1% of users simply had their credit line extended. And some of those people decided to spend egregiously from this new credit line.
They probably thought they could make a quick buck and pay back the AIG mortgage that they defaulted on. Apparently we have learned nothing from the economic collapse.
Zecco made the error. Zecco made the error of extending credit to people who did not warrant it. Those users then made the mistake of gambling with other people's money, therefore the customers should eat any losses. But then they should also get to keep any gains. What I don't understand is how Zecco can legally make panic sales on a customer's account without the customer's knowledge or consent. Seems to me they would have been better off contacting the customers and working with them to back out the trades in a prudent and responsible manner, rather than forcing sales and virtually guaranteeing a loss. Good luck collecting from the customers that you screwed over that way!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"Wonder how they define "egregious and fraudulent"?"
any trades that resulted in a loss.
Any trades that resulted in a gain we will just keep the difference and call it ok.
A friend just found a bug in his (production) Java code, despite strict typing:
if(condition); //Code that always happens due to bug
{
}
Strict vs. loose typing has little effect on code quality. Testing+QA is how you avoid mistakes, not strict typing.
Strict typing only removes a small class of runtime errors. Which are then reintroduced due to strict typing (and compilation) being such a pain that most projects use loosely typed XML config files for an awful lot of "programming". Doh.
I think a car analogy is due.
Zecco made the error. Zecco eats the consequences. Period. Why should people be held liable for someone else's mistakes?
So you drive into work, and manage somehow to park your car in the wrong spont, belonging to and reserved for a neighboring business. Upon leaving the office to head home, you discover the mistake, and find the parking spots owner has stripped it down to the frame and sold all the parts on craigslist.
Explain why you should eat these consequences.
If maybe your neighbor had called a tow truck and had the vehicle impounded, sure I could see you having to eat that.
But I'm not following why you should have to eat your neighbors blatant theft of something he knew wasn't his. Just because you put the car in his spot is not a valid reason for him to think its now his car. Similarly, if the bank makes a mistake in your favor with your account, its not valid to assume the money is yours. The bank should eat all the costs of fixing their mistake, but if you attempt to try and keep or use the money that isn't yours, you become liable for that. Their is lots of supporting precedence for this too.
Nay, but duckest thou, the swine before which thy olde joke was cast has freakin' Haskell.
Um, perhaps a better analogy would be if the pharmacy gave the patient enough medication for a year, with instructions on how much to take each day, and the user then takes all the pills at once knowing that they are all an april fools joke, and can't possibly be real medicine.
You obviously have no idea how a stock brokerage account works and need to shut up. Buying power can be taken away at any time, that is the risk you run when you buy on margin (which is what they were doing). You sign pages and pages of documents explaining margin when you open a brokerage account. You are buying stuff with the broker's money, on loan. Period. If you go blow it on stocks that go down in value, YOU are responsible for the loss, NOT THE BROKER.
Once you get a real bank account, maybe you will understand.
use haskell;
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
If it's clearly marked on signage that if you park in that spot your car will be impounded, sold etc. then, yeah, you fucked up, tough shit....
If you transfer your money to my account, it's mine. Tough titty on you. If you didn't want me to have it, shouldn't of put it there....
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
I don't think this is quite such a clear-cut case, as it's my understanding that Zecco's "buying power" number is actually a *credit* balance, not a cash balance, and is often substantially different than the actual amount of money deposited with them. My bank has raised my allowable credit on my cards several times without notifying me - should I then go to jail for charging against that newly available credit?
Certainly Zecco made an industrial-strength error, but given the flaky nature of their "buying power" calculations, I don't really think that the opportunistic folks that performed trades on the credit Zecco extended to them should be penalized beyond repaying the credit they were inadvertently granted, and perhaps a finance charge equal to a percentage of the profits realized. If you lost money and are in the hole to Zecco for half a million dollars, well, that's your problem.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Except in this case it wasn't "money" it was "buying power". Which isn't what you have in cash but what you have available with cash + margin.
So they for some reason decided to extend you margin at 500:1 or something, since I doubt your margin agreement changed to match and I'm also certain it says what the actual ratio is and that if you ever exceed it they can perform a "margin call" and force you to sell stocks until you are back within the required ratio.
So yippee you took that million dollars in credit and spent it on stocks. And shock horror they performed a margin call as per the contract you signed when you set up the account. Have fun with the interest charges too.
Seriously, if amex sends you a credit card with a $10k limit instead of a $1k limit by mistake you think you can cash out the $10k and not end up owing them money?
If they had added a million dollars to the cash position you might have a point, but they didn't. They extended a million dollars worth of credit and then decided to collect on it as per a signed contract.
"panic sales" is called a margin call, and completely standard...
Perl's type system is very strict -- it just only has three types.
If it's clearly marked on signage that if you park in that spot your car will be impounded, sold etc. then, yeah, you fucked up, tough shit....
Good luck with that. Try selling the cars of the people who park in your spot and you'll end up on charges of auto theft. Pointing at your "clearly marked sign" isn't going get you very far.
If you transfer your money to my account, it's mine. Tough titty on you. If you didn't want me to have it, shouldn't of put it there....
Good luck with that too.
Its clearly marked in the account's terms that this isn't true. And they probably even have a copy on file with your signature on them. And quite unlike your "I will sell your car" sign, this will be legally binding.
Yes. I'm chronically broke. I would notice just about any extra money.
thou.duckest((FreakinHaskell) oldjoke, swine);
I think a file-sharing analogy is due. I am not, however, willing to make it myself. Slashdotters have a peculiar sense of when taking others' property and violating others' licensing terms is acceptable or not.
The Perl pseudocode that started it all..
1) Increase tradeable $.
2) __$_$$_$_$_$$
3) PROFIT!
I gues this all depends on location...
If it's in the contract you sign with a bank, then fair enough....
I was talking about the ethics of the situation however, not legalities.
On that score though, certainly where I live (Scotland), if you have a parking facility you offer to people under conditions (such as your car being forfeit if you don't pay), you've agreed to a contract by parking there, as long as the sign is clearly visible etc.
So tough shit....
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Isn't it hard to keep track of replies if you post as an unregistered AC?
Sure, static typing isn't magic : it won't find every bugs in your programs...
But assessing that it has absolutely no positive effect and that you need ugly frameworks full of XML to compensate for the lack of dynamism only shows that you never tried a strongly statically typed modern functional language like Haskell.
The world isn't black and white, just because static typing isn't the panacea doesn't mean we should all use dynamic language and test every single function to see how it (mis)behave under conditions that couldn't ever happen in a decently typed language. Besides the suggested Haskell isn't only statically typed, it is also a purely functional language, which means a completely different paradigm than Java or Perl (both fairly imperative) often credited of reducing implementation error and facilitating tests.
--
Jedai (not Anonymous)
Yes, that's correct.
If you make a deposit in your account, you cannot cash it until either (1) it clears or (2) a hold is placed on your account in the amount of the check to cover it in case it bounces.
Since your buying power was not affected, this means that you are able to treat the deposited item as cash, investing it in securities. This is only possible if there is a hold on equivalent funds in your account.
What is boils down to is that in order for the funds to be available for you to purchase securities with, a hold has to be placed on covering funds. If Zecco instead had a policy where funds could not be invested until the deposit clears, then you'd be able to withdraw the $10000 without a problem.
Say your buying power is 1x your deposits. Your despoits were 10,000 (100% cleared) and $500 (not cleared). You buy 500 of securities, and withdraw $10000. Then the check bounces. Now you have $0 deposits to cover $500 of securities. Uh-oh... FTC securities violation.
Because of the fact that Zecco needs to make funds available for investment immediately (I dunno if this is statutory, or if it's to compete in the marketplace), they have to place the hold on your $500.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Haskell's typing language is Turing Complete. It is extremely expressive and easy to use. It does a lot more than "remove a small class of runtime errors". It is a tool in itself.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Jeez, it's almost like the GP was trying to state the opposite of the truth... I mean, not only does TFA say otherwise, but so does the post DIRECTLY above him.
What a dumbass.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Wait let me get this straight.
I'm sorry is it just me or does it seem like Zecco are the ones committing fraud here.
If I offered you a ten dollar line of credit to purchase stock with, you accepted and purchased said stock, I changed my mind, and sold the stock (which is your property) it seems to me that I would get in trouble for fraudulently selling your property.
Unless I'm missing something here...
You're car analogy is wrong. They didn't put the money into their account, they extended them a line of credit.
I'm sorry is it just me or does it seem like Zecco are the ones committing fraud here.
If I offered you a ten dollar line of credit to purchase stock with, you accepted and purchased said stock, I changed my mind, and sold the stock (which is your property) it seems to me that I would get in trouble for fraudulently selling your property.
Unless I'm missing something here...
On that score though, certainly where I live (Scotland), if you have a parking facility you offer to people under conditions (such as your car being forfeit if you don't pay), you've agreed to a contract by parking there, as long as the sign is clearly visible etc.
So tough shit....
I really doubt that is the law, but hey, to each their own.
Here on the intelligent side of the ocean contract law is influenced by common sense in that they have invented nifty terms like:
"significant imbalance"
"good faith"
and
"consideration"
This prevents dishonest Scots from taking advantage of little old ladies by posting signs saying they'll lose their house if they don't pay $10 before walking into your store.
> use strict;
/e switch on the substitution operator. So there's a trade-off between the guarantees that strict typing can give you, and the power and convenience that loose typing can give you. Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems. And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
While the strict pragma is undeniably useful, ESPECIALLY for modules that are called by other people's code, it is not the same thing as strict typing.
Strict typing means that a variable has a specific data type (like integer, for instance), and if you try to put anything ELSE in it, you get an error.
However, this is really only useful, IMO, if you can get the error at compile time -- which implies that your language can't have certain fairly powerful and undeniably useful constructs, several of which Perl does have, such as, for instance, the
IMO, Perl makes good sense for the web-based front end (i.e., the UI), but it should probably be getting the financial details from a back-end process...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
From the reports, it sounds like what the Zecco error did wasn't really to increase the amount of cash in the customer accounts, but rather, incease the amount of margin available to them. I.e., it allowed the customers in question to borrow millions of dollars. That makes it doubly dumb to actually try to exploit Zecco's error; you're supposed to pay that money back!
Are you adequate?
You're car analogy is wrong. They didn't put the money into their account, they extended them a line of credit.
Same difference.
If I offered you a ten dollar line of credit to purchase stock with, you accepted and purchased said stock, I changed my mind, and sold the stock (which is your property) it seems to me that I would get in trouble for fraudulently selling your property.
First, Logging in one day and finding out that the bank had inexplicably granted you a million dollar line of credit is not "an offer of a line of credit", and your asking for trouble if you decide to go and use it. You should immediately be looking into why this happened. Perhaps there was a change in the maximum leverage, or some other ratio... but nobody just has a million dollars of credit granted to them without some sort of disclosure. Hell, even your credit card company proudly tells you each time they raise your limit... its not just a million dollars higher one day.
Second, when the line of credit was discovered and rectified, it effectively lowered the amount of credit you were allowed, which lowered your margin, which per your existing agreement, allowed them to forcibly sell your portfolio to bring it back to within your approved line of credit.
Thirdly, Zecco has already agreed to absorb the differences to ensure no ones account was impacted. From this it appears its keeping profits as well as absorbing losses from the mistake, as well as covering all fees. (Although profits, losses, and fee transaction records are being logged... and then reversed, which is as it should be in any sort of proper accounting model...) so the whole things is mostly a non-issue. And most of the 'excitement' is because not all the reversing transaction entries have been applied yet.
Mod parent up +1 Intelligent.
Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems.
Strongly typed languages often contain constructs that allow to emulate this behaviour if absolutely necessary. For example, F# (and thus, I assume, ocaml) allows unions.
type myType = {
| type_A of int
| type_B
| type_C of string
}
They are still strictly typed, just that their type is (A or B or C). That way, you get flexibility when you need it, while retaining the behaviour of a strongly typed language.
And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
Simple doesn't mean unprincipled. I started coding exclusively in F# last summer, and I haven't looked back. On several occasions, I have written several hundred lines of complex scientific code in one go, ending up with a bug-free piece of software right after the first compilation. If you can do this in perl or python, you are a better programmer than me. Plus, the code looks gorgeous, and you can actually read it from top to bottom and understand what's going on.
We would like to set the record straight on the alleged April Fool's prank. Insinuations that Zecco Trading pulled a bad joke on its customers are factually inaccurate and complete misinformation. Please take the effort to read the real story: http://www.zecco.com/blogs/zeccopulse/Setting-The-Record-Straight.aspx">Setting The Record Straight
Yes, you're missing something. Margin lending is very strictly regulated, and the regulations allow brokers to sell off your positions in many situations; this is called a margin call. From the SEC investor guidance site:
Are you adequate?
Why?
If I go to your house and decide to impound the car in your driveway, am I stealing it?
The only reason people get to tow vehicles is because of that clearly marked sign. if it can make some kind of legal agreement, then why not say the car will be sold?
Second, when the line of credit was discovered and rectified, it effectively lowered the amount of credit you were allowed, which lowered your margin, which per your existing agreement, allowed them to forcibly sell your portfolio to bring it back to within your approved line of credit.
Actually that would cause a margin call, if someone had made a profit off of their investment they would probably be able to come up with the margin given that it would mean guaranteed profits. Also with a margin call you are given the profits Zecco simply reversed all of the transactions and took both profits and losses.
Seems more like a badly repurposed Lisp joke, since syntax is a sin...err...
I had a $200+ bank error in my account in the late 1980s... I waited a month before spending the money. I then spent it without problems. Your suggestion that the bank missed some account debits is probably why this happened.
Tech Public Policy stuff
(Though I am very active commenter and normally get decent moderations.)
That's my point. I find value in reading posts from folks who often 'get it'. Being able to associate a name or alias to a post allows the style or history to enhance what people are talking about. Posting AC (with the gazillion others) mixes you in with goatse links. ;)
Maybe its just a way to find interesting people or make new friends.
I am not sure if I even want to discuss with the part of the /. that filters out everything not posted by registered users (who are somehow inheritly better people, I guess).
I browse at -1. There are many bright, humorous, and insightful comments at all levels. Although I agree with the mod system, I do not live in a 1, 2, or 3 mistake world. I participate on /. for fun and knowledge. I can very easily ignore/skip the stuff that's not compelling enough.
IANAL, but generally there are limits on the kinds of contracts you can enter into.
Suppose I (a complete stranger) write up a contract whereby you sell me your house for one dollar (assume you completely own your house). You foolishly sign it, and I hand you a dollar. Then a week later you realize how dumb that was and refuse to let me occupy the home - we go to court.
I suspect that I would not have a strong case in court. If I were a very close personal friend or a family member I might prevail, but as a stranger a court would ask why somebody would sell me an expensive house for one dollar. Now, if the house were sitting on a superfund site then the contract might seem reasonable, but when you sell a perfectly nice house for $1 a court is going to ask why.
Courts can actually be pretty reasonable in these kinds of circumstances. If it looks like one party is out to take advantage of others the court is going to tend to side against them. So, if you get people to sign contracts with onerous conditions on the hope that they will default and you can wipe them out, the court is going to side against you.
In this particular situation if you logged in and your account balance was 1% higher and you somehow lost money that wasn't yours and the broker tried to penalize you, the court would probably rule against the broker because an honest person might not notice that something was wrong with such a small error. On the other hand, if you try to cash out an account balance that is 100X the expected amount a court is going to recognize that you're trying to take advantage of your broker and they'll slam you for it.
The purpose of contracts is for reasonable people to conduct business in a civil manner. They're not intended to be weapons to take advantage of others, and courts will enforce this.
OH nose you caughted me!
Right but on a margin call you still get any profits and are responsible for any losses.
So if your saving gets wired away due to a "computer error" on your part (like malware installed by a flash ad or smth), you should eat the losses? Have no claim to have your money back?
Haskell does however not help you if you put in a divide instead of a multiply in some special case compound interest calculation (or some such). It's more likely a math/logic/database admin error than a typing related error (even a unit conversion) that caused such a glorious snafu.
Probably a bit late for anyone to notice this...
Everyone is saying "Stupid customers, spending money that thye should know isn't yours!".
Unfortunately if you are running an automated trading system, the process goes something like:
- I want to place a trade
- Ask broker system how much money/margin etc I have available for the trade
- Size trade based on response from broker
- Place trade
usually these systems don't keep an entirely seperate portfolio system (especially retail systems) to ensure that the brokers response is actually correct.
> many of those users started trading with the nonexistent money
If I was to suddenly find a million bucks in my account, I'd go and find out where it came from and if it's really mine, before I start spending it.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Yeah, _$ would likely cause problems.
But at least perl uses a different operator to distinguish between string concatenation and, say, numeric addition. Unlike, hrm, javascript.
I think the most sad thing about my comment is I meant it to be funny and it got modded informative. Oh, well. Not everyone can know what strong typing really means.
If I go to your house and decide to impound the car in your driveway, am I stealing it?
Pretty much.
The only reason people get to tow vehicles is because of that clearly marked sign. if it can make some kind of legal agreement, then why not say the car will be sold?
The sign doesn't 'make some kind of legal agreement'. It doesn't do anything of the sort. The sign merely advises you that the property owner is availing himself of an established legal right. Local law will specify something like this...
http://www.richmond.ca/services/ttp/parktow/pregulations.htm
As you can see, the city has established that private parking lot owners can tow (note that it ONLY gives them the right to tow. They can't crush, or sell, or do something else to the car.) Then it goes on to prescribe under what situations you can tow..., and some of those circumstances require specific signage to be posted.
So when someone puts up a towing sign, they are not 'establishing a legal agreement' that can say anything they want, they are satisfying the existing regulations, in order to qualify for permission to tow under the circumstances specified in the regulations.
The regulations set out the maximum rates, the maximum distance the impound lot can be, it imposes limits on what the parking restrictions can be, it may even specify the wording and dimensions of the signs.
Its not like you can just post a sign and create a legal agreement. However, if you post a very specific sign, per existing regulations, you can avail yourself of the specific rights granted by those regulations. That's a LONG way away from the carte blanche you thought you could have.