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Algorithmic Trading Glitch Costs Firm $440 Million
alstor writes "Yesterday an update to Knight Capital Group's algorithmic trading software caused massive volume buys and sells, resulting in large price swings on the New York Stock Exchange. As a result, the NYSE canceled some of the trades, but today the loss to Knight has been calculated at $440 million. Ignoring adjustments for inflation, this makes the cost of this glitch almost as much as the $475 million charge Intel took for the Pentium FDIV Bug, which might warrant adding this bug to the list of worst bugs. In light of this loss and the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash, perhaps investors will demand changes from firms using algorithmic trading, since the SEC is apparently too antiquated to do anything about it (PDF)."
For those not interested in going through all of the links just to find the one that links to the relevant article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2012/08/02/knight-capital-trading-disaster-carries-440-million-price-tag/
I'd tell the firm "too bad". It shouldn't be up to the NYSE to make sure companies don't do something stupid. Back in time a ways, when someone tried to game the system and then failed hard they would be ignored and forgotten. Now, with bailouts and do-overs and participation trophies, we ignore hard working americans who don't expect handouts and reward those who don't want to take responsibility for their actions.
Actually, NYSE did tell them exactly that.
Knight is on the hook for the full 440mm USD loss. NYSE stuck them with every single trade that they transacted during the particular time span.
And before you spew the bailouts/ do-overs/hard working american rhetoric, let's actually review the facts related to the topic on hand.
-Knight is a market maker. Their sole purpose on NYSE to ensure liquidity and make money. They do it by actively stepping in to sell and buy particular securities. There is nothing there that "games" the system.
-They rolled out a new application mid week and apparently turned it on without fully testing it causing a huge spike in volume
-The algorithm, rather stupidly, bought high and sold low.
-NYSE actually called within 30 minutes Knight to inform them that they might be accidentally executing incorrectly
-Knight basically ignored the warning and let the algorithm run for a full hour.
-End of the day, Knight is on hook for the entire loss. Not because it was a "mistake" but because these are all legitimate trades with legitimate counterparties and didn't violate any rules.
-Nyse has stated that and has said there would be no further appeals allowed on the issue.
It did not. You could be thinking of 2 different things.
You might be thinking of the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) Market. Here we have swaps that are built on slices of bonds which are built on mortgages. Or, better yet, synthetic CDOs, where are swaps built upon other CDOs. Instead of doing the hard work of evaluating the thousands of underlying pieces people used algorithms to determine the prices – and then the banks used the CDOs as collateral to borrow money to buy more CDOs. The algorithms made bad assumptions about the statistical on defaults. This is a completely different beast – it moves very slow.
Or, during the same time, a lot of firms that used statistical algorithmic trades (which Knight is) where losing money. They were using computers to shave pennies of trades – basically eating the lunch of the old line market makes. For years they were quietly chugging away making a constant steam of money and all of a sudden they were losing money. The computers worked fine. The markets were in a state of chaos, the underlying assumptions were no longer valid. A lot of them just turned off their computers for 6 months until the market sorted itself out again.
The problem w/ HFT is buy/sell orders get placed and then immediately (less than a second later) cancelled. The HFT algo puts out the trade with no intent of actually executing the trade.
That is a violation of the rules, but strangely enough, the SEC sees no need to take action.
It is also questionable if the HFT algo actually has the cash on hand behind the order at the time the order is placed.
The idea that HFT injects liquidity is up for debate, as we see the HFTs turned off at times of crisis. Thus, no one will step in to backstop the market. Otherwise if the HFT were working to ensure liquidity there would be no such thing as a flash crash.