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Swedish Stock Exchange Hit By Programming Snafu
New submitter whizzter writes "I was reading the Swedish national news today and an image in a stock exchange related article struck my eye. An order had been placed for 4 294 967 290 futures (0xfffffffa or -6 if treated as a 32-bit signed integer), each valued at approximately 16,000 USD, giving a neat total of almost 69 trillion USD. The order apparently started to affect valuations and was later annulled, however it is said to have caused residual effects in the system and trading was halted for several hours."
The stockholm stock exchange is part of the NASDAQ-OMX group ( http://www.nasdaqomx.com/aboutus/whatisnasdaq/ ) . Do they use the same software?
...someone forgot that putting an int into a function that expects a UINT32 is not a good idea....
Since I doubt you can buy -6 shares,
I'm willing to bet (if only I lived in a free country where I could go on Intrade to place the bet, but I digress) that someone has a UTF-8 input field with input sanitizing that only looks for one of the bazillion "minus/dash like" glyphs and a UTF-8 to int input routine that understands all or at least most of the "minus/dash like" glyphs. Happened to me once. Of course I didn't crash a world wide financial exchange, or you would have heard about it...
"Similar looking" yet different UTF-8 glyphs are one of the most exciting parts of the standard. "glyph to concept" mapping is not 1:1 any more like the old 7 bit ASCII days.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As a Swede I found the above posts very funny, though some things could be pointed out for the sake of clarity.
1) Björk is actually from Iceland. Can we elect The Swedish House Mafia as representatives of our culture instead please? ;-)
2) While I think Swedes on average consume a bit more hard liquor than the US, it's nothing like eastern Europe. We are mostly a beer people, and we are not afraid to import quality stuff. Though I guess in comparison to what goes for beer in the US, it's can almost be considered hard liquor
3) IKEA isn't a publicly traded company, and it's now owned by what is a series of (supposedly) non-profit trusts across the world with the single objective to keep it alive forever. Yes, Billy the bookcase will probably outlive you.