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And the nanex guess at why it happened: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3525.html

"We think the two periods of time when there was a sudden drop in trading (9:48 and 9:52) are when they restarted the system. Once it came back, the Tester, being part of the package, fired up too and proceeded to continue ..."

Ouch!

I love dumb coders!

Worse dumb mistake I've ever made was to accidentally send a test email to several thousand live customers instead of the test accounts. That was a sinking feeling.

But creating a bug that loses your company half a billion dollars in thirty minutes and bankrupts them, must be stomach-churning.

Much, much worse than the bug in the market making algorithms was the design failure of not having some out-of-band mechanism to kill order traffic (or of said mechanism's failure to be tested adequately).

This is a risk management failure much more than a programming error.

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