Knight Capital posts $389.9 million loss on trading glitch

[sle]

Quote from syswizard:
outsourcing is corporate America's dirty little secret

You seem to be pretty bitter about outsourcing. Is there a reason for it?

Personally, my experience is that programmers in other countries are just as bad (or good, depending on your point of view) as their American counterparts. The ones with good education and good critical skills are good and fun to work with, the ones that suck are equally bad here and there.

 

[PocketChange]

One issue is in JBO/self clearing type accounts there are no credit back stops.

 

[Bob111]

Quote from DeeDeeTwo:

As an engineer that runs Automated Systems...
It completely blows my mind that limits were not set...
That would have aborted Algos X% away from the market...
Nor was there a KILL switch to just cancel ALL activity.

Wait, there's more...
This went on for 30-40 minutes before someone shut it down...
When it was apparent within 30 seconds something was VERY wrong.

Even a basic retail platform like TWS...
Is set to require manual overrides for potentially erroneous orders.

Knight is effectively bankrupt...
Whoever ran the Systems department...
Was probably frog-marched out the door.

+1. i'm little single retail guy,but even on my level i run cross reference from at least 3 different data sources and complete numerous price checks before i send my order to any exchange..i guess i do that because i've seen this in the past(Knight included) and i trade my OWN money. when money is not yours and you just doing your little part of the job-you get what most of the "customers" in this (and any other field) get-FU in the face...they just don't give a f**ck..simply cause it's not their money on the line

there is gotta be AT LEAST some very simple\basic check levels in place such as -how far away stock was trading,how fast it's moving,how much you are holding etc..it's kind of common sense..from any perspective-either risk management,programming or even like i said-common sense..

 

[syswizard]

The version that was installed did not have those features....or because of the 1000 multiplier factor, the software thought it was losing $1000, when in fact it was losing $ 1 million !!!