Whoa Baby! What happened?

Quote from Lobster:



That's true if ESH3 was his only position, but if he had other contracts or stocks in his account, they might have been liquidated because of the huge (albeit temporary) drop in account equity. Let's say I have an IB universal account with 20 different long stock positions and short ESH3 as a hedge. The spike would have caused the ESH3 to be liquidated at a loss of say $4000 per contract, way more than maintenance margin. Now my equity is suddenly negative or way too low to meet the stock margin requirement. The broker will sell all my stocks (after hours!) and leave me with an additional huge loss there.

I don't believe IB will automatically liquidate equities during pre or post-market. I believe the auto-liquidation for equities only occurs between 9:30am-4:00pm. Please correct me if I am wrong. Not sure how it works for futures.
 
Quote from range:

Eric Wolff, the exchange's managing director for regulatory affairs, said it was not clear what had set off the move. "The rumors that somebody did something phenomenally stupid are probably wrong," he said. "It does not look like an idiot with a single order caused this event."

HOLY!!!!!!!!!!!

That is unbelievable.
:eek:
 
Quote from PuffyGums:

I was also wondering how a 2,000 lot order gets honored when the limit is supposed to be 250 or 300 or some such number?

I may be wrong, but I think they took those limits off.
 
Quote from sammybea:

In my opinion, people often gripe whenever they get a chance to. There was a problem with globex and CME dealt with it in a timely and fair method. Yes 860 is arbitrary.. but still very reasonable.


Often people do gripe for arbitrary reasons, but this is beyond the normal scope of most of the bickering...I remember the early days of Globex when this did occur more often...At that time, the electronic contract really was the wild west...But, at some point, with the volume and liquidity of the minis nowadays, its just really bad news that this stuff can be triggered like this...Moral of the story, imo, is to really watch one's backside after the cash closes...Sure, these spikes can and do occur in the middle of the day if the FOMC does their ambush, but the majority of the time I have seen these spikes occur in the NQ, and now the ES, right after that cash closes and things go haywire...
 
Quote from PuffyGums:

If the cash and pit was open, the arbs would have taken care of this.



However, wouldn't all those free money guys be upset if their trades were busted, and they were left hanging long or short. If there really was some sort of glitch, and not real volume driving it up then the arbs wouldn't have made any difference.

Wasn't the pit open?

kp
 
Quote from abishiai:





However, wouldn't all those free money guys be upset if their trades were busted, and they were left hanging long or short. If there really was some sort of glitch, and not real volume driving it up then the arbs wouldn't have made any difference.

Wasn't the pit open?

kp
Oopps right the pit stays open till 4:15. So where were those arbs? If it was a glitch, I'd like to here what kind it was.
 
Quote from PuffyGums:


Oopps right the pit stays open till 4:15. So where were those arbs? If it was a glitch, I'd like to here what kind it was.

Good question.

What are we getting for that .25 tick/spread?
 
Quote from larrybf:

Personally i was not in the market during this particular spike fiasco. however , i have been on the wrong side of CME NONSense BEFORE and in my opinionif enough of us mid size retail futures traders took our business away from the emini and started trading the CBOT dow futures this crap might stop. BUT it will require a bunch of us to mutiny. Unless we reduce emini volume by 100,000 contracts a day probably nothing will happen. ANYWAY, as soon as the spread on the dow futures gets as small as emini ES i am gonna switch.

wots da spread on the dow now anyway?
 
so next day and we still don't know what happened? If, as the CME spokesman opined, no one did anything stupid to set this off, I am concerned about the next time someone decides that well, that move was just too large so we will bust everyone's trade. In commodities those types of decisions have an uncanny ability to occur when some exchange big shot is in deep shit.

What we seem to know now is that a big order set off a cascade of buy stops. The limit lock was off because of the time. Perphaps they should leave them on for 24 hours. That would be fairer than just arbitrarily picking a number. CME needs to get a handle on this pronto.
 
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