In defense of those who trade stocks over futures, most trader's who bought COCO today were looking for a scalp. By buying the monster offer, they were expecting an extremely quick move back up once the offer was taken/pulled. This was a fairly low risk trade with a short anticipated time commitment. Most people know you get considerably more leverage trading futures or currencies, but the COCO trade should have been a layup. Nobody is saying that $1000 put to work in the stock market would make more than $1000 leveraged in the futures. Furthermore, the CBOT and CME have broken trades based on errant order entry in the past. Oftentimes, depending on how the breaks pan out, one can be left with zero profits, or worse--one losing leg of the trade still on.
Nasdaq sunk to a low today by allowing a stock to reopen before making a decision to break trades. They amplified an existing problem and shifted the loss from the party who made the error, to everyone BUT them. There should never have been a trade break in the first place. In my memory, it is unprecedented. Clearly the desk that made the error was a member firm, and nasdaq was willing to get them off the hook at the expense of looking like complete jackasses in the process. Clearly, they didn't think things through, or didn't care. There were reports that the desk that made the error was Bear Stearns. If a hedge fund had their own order desk and hadn't sent the order to an institutional desk, the hedgies would have been been stuck with the trades. But, since Bear would have been liable for the error, nasdaq pulled the scummiest move I have ever seen. A little over a month ago, a very similar situation occurred in NIHD. Someone sent an INCA market sell order for 500K shares and the stock tanked about 10 sticks--which is what you would expect to happen with an offer of that size. Nasdaq(correctly) refused to break the trades, stating that the market was orderly, and thus there were no grounds to break the trades. Instinet was left, unsuccesfully, trying to negotiate voluntary givebacks of all the shares sold on behalf of the client that made the error. Is there any doubt that such opposite outcomes could occur, has everything to do with who made the error, and what connections to nasdaq they have? Using nasdaq's recent NIHD decision as evidence of inconsitency and misfeasance, I expect the lawsuit brought on by this debacle will be a slam dunk.