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mschwar99

CNBC now reporting on air that a human error by a trader at a major firm triggered the interday low.

Breaking News of cnbc.com reads:

Trading Error at Major Firm Blamed for Market Plunge: Sources (Story Developing)

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The rumor is that the Citi e-mini desk sold $16B of futures ($SPY) by mistake and meant to do $16M.

(I don't buy it. CNBC is propaganda.)

I don't see how the order could even be placed. An emini contract has a 50x multiplier for SPY. That's about 50,000 per contract; that's a lot of contracts. I don't think such an order could be entered without error at Citi's desk and it would damn sure never pass checks at the exchange. Even if it was not flagged as odd, they would still be required to have on hand around 1.6 billion in collateral at very high leverage.

Of course, a brokerage like Citi will run most of their trades larger than 1000 lots through their program trading, which splits the order into lots of smaller trades of 100-200. I agree that it sure sounds suspicious, but I seriously doubt the exchanges saw a single bid for 1.6b shares of the e-mini.

Plus what system makes you type in "billion" or "million" instead of "1000000000" or "1000000"?

I call B$ on this.

any decent trading system. When millsecs mean the difference between millions of dollars, having a trader type in all those zeros, then count them, would be costly time.

Fast traders don't click on icons and enter values, they enter an entire trade on one line.

Buy 1000 shares of Apple computer at 250.05 might be entered as:

buy1000aapl250.05

So what you are saying is they type it in with zeros.

Maybe you should have had an example not contrary to what you said.

I worked as a trader, and I can confirm that this is not the way trades are hand-entered.

....on your platform.

...on my platforms.

Text based systems: FBSI, SIS

GUI based systems (when not pointing and clicking): Patsystems JTrader<A>, Trading Technologies' XTrader<A>

<A> These are systems I have used for personal use but not at work

I agree with this. Each platform can be completely different. Banks often have their own internal platforms too. Some are even set to trade in millions by default. So when you enter an order for 15 shares, you're really buy 15 million shares and so on.

I don't think we are doing millisecond-resolution trades by hand.

That sort of command line looks like a recipe for disaster.

You should see the command lines the Navy uses for targetting (I'm not kidding).

fair point, not in finance so didn't consider this.

However I find it extremely foolhardy that mistyping one character has an impact one thousand times greater, and that such an action can be performed without some kind of validation (whether explicitly via a confirmation, or implicitly in how the UX is designed).

Then again it is probably because of the typo risk that bankers get paid so much ...

`rm -rf` vs `rm -ri` could have that sort of impact. Or `sleep 1; shutdown -r now` vs `sleep 1h; shutdown -r now` to reboot the production server.

I once deleted all my source code instead of backing it up to my floppy by doing "del ." while command.com was in wrong drive. (Should have done "del a:\."; two letters cost me a night of running an undelete program)

I like my Bash tools as much as the next HNer, but always think it's faster, safer, and more accurate to use a windowed gui for moving or deleting important files and folders.

I call B$ on M$

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