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Fattest Finger Ever Slams Stockholm Stock Exchange With $70 Trillion Buy Order
We have seen some supposed 'fat-finger' trades in the last few days but Stockholm's stock exchange was brought to its knees yesterday as a record-breaking order hit the book and halted trading for four hours. A 4.3 billion contract buy order in the OMX30 futures (the Swedish equivalent of the Dow futures) caused the fiasco. This is equivalent to a SEK460 trillion notional exposure - or 131 times the Swedish GDP (around USD70 trillion). As one trader of the exchange noted, via SvD Narangsliv, "This just shows that it can get really bananas with machines" referring to the growing element of automated securities trading on that exchange. What's Swedish for FUBAR?
Via SvD Naringsliv
The giant warrant december semester in OMXS30, a security equivalent to a basket consisting of the Stockholm Stock Exchange's 30 largest companies, and where trade is very important for the overall pricing of the stock market.
The order was on buy side of the order book and covered more than 4.2 billion futures, to a unit price of almost 107,000 dollars. It gives a theoretical value of 459 561 500 030 000, ie nearly 460 trillion dollars. Sweden's gross domestic product, by comparison, amounted in 2011 to more than 3500 billion.
- This just shows that it can go really bananas with machines, writes a trade to Svenska Dagbladet, referring to the growing element of automated securities trading.
According to the Exchange spokesman Carl Norell has no order of that size team into the system. Instead, it is about a parsing incurred in exchange system due to a technical error. The order, Norell writes in an email, anullerades, but still remains a problem why the index derivatives market is closed since just before 10 am this morning.
- Troubleshooting is underway and we communicate constantly updates to our members, writes Carl Norell.
On Thursday, the Stockholm Stock Exchange's derivatives trading open as usual.
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your DDM HFT loves you and it loves internalizing your order
"What's Swedish for FUBAR?"
easy...ECB.
Squirrely Stew... bork bork bork
Go ahead and eat spend them. We'll just make print more.
Number 4294967290 in binary code can be written 11111111111111111111111111111010.
Number 4294967290 in octal code can be written 37777777772.
Number 4294967290 in hexadecimal code can be written FFFFFFFA.
The square root of 4294967290 is 65535.9999542. Number 4294967290 multiplied by 2 equals 8589934580. Divided by 2 equals 2147483645. The sum of all digits equals 52. Number 4294967290 raised to the power of 2 is 1.84467440222E+19. Number 4294967290 raised to the power of 3 is 7.92281621822E+28.
The cosine of number 4294967290 is -0.722476253312. The sine of number 4294967290 is -0.691395735741. The tangent of number 4294967290 is 0.956980568664. The radian equivalent of number 4294967290 is 74961320.476. The equivalent of number 4294967290 in degrees is 246083498864. The base-10 logarithm of number 4294967290 is 9.63295986064.
http://www.all-numbers.com/4294967290
Then why is there any correlation at all between Gold and the paper GLD?
Guess even BigFoot is trading in these fucked up markets now.
IKEA is Swedish for FUBAR
Have you eaten those "meatballs"?
In other news, at least there's consistency in the insanity, daily now
Godspeed, Muppet Meat! Godspeed!
Ah those pesky corner cases...
Here you go:
-----
# define MAX_ALLOWED_TRANSACTION_COST 1000000.0
if ( transaction_cost > MAX_ALLOWED_TRANSACTION_COST ) {
printf("Not so fast cowboy. Stick that fat finger somewhere else...\n");
} else {
proceed_transaction(transaction_cost);
}
-----
Stockolm stock exchange, you're welcome...
Below is how you say it in Swedish.
Regards,
Cooter
~~~~~~~~~~
Ve-a hefe-a seee sume-a sooppused 'fet-feenger' tredes in zee lest foo deys boot Stuckhulm's stuck ixchunge-a ves bruooght tu its knees yesterdey es a recurd-breekeeng oorder heet zee buuk und helted tredeeng fur fuoor huoors. A 4.3 beelliun cuntrect booy oorder in zee OoMX30 footoores (zee Svedeesh iqooeefelent ooff zee Doo footoores) coosed zee feeescu. Thees is iqooeefelent tu a SEK460 treelliun nushunel ixpusoore-a - oor 131 teemes zee Svedeesh GDP (eruoond USD70 treelliun). Es oone-a treder ooff zee ixchunge-a nuted, feea SfD Nerungsleef, &qoout;Thees joost shoos thet it cun get reelly bununes veet mecheenes&qoout; refferreeng tu zee grooeeng ilement ooff ootumeted secooreeties tredeeng oon thet ixchunge-a. Vhet's Svedeesh fur FOoBER? Bork Bork Bork!
Looks like an unsaturated subtraction to me...
someone tried to buy -1 futures contracts?
"Swedish for FUBAR"
Yodel-A-He-Hooo
It was just a trick to try to prop up the market, and it kind of did in the end!
Uppfuckat bortom all igenkännelse... Shit, now the black helicopters know my origin...
. What's Swedish for FUBAR?
FUBJORN? ;-)
Bork bork bork!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsbY4YfT6Mg
Björk! Björk! Björk!
Björk attacks! - Björk atacaFÖBÅR
"Goldman Sachs."
Haha, that was close enough! The other suggestions are a bit funny since this god damn language were speaking is spawned from swedish and is probably the one bearing the most resemblance to it...
Problem with letting any digital life operate without simulus it starts to run it's own numbers to match the environment given. So obviously somewhere the Algo found a piece of information and acted on it. University of Arizona had a study to the effect, without researcher inputs the bots went apeshit and started designing their own controls.
Considering the morons that bought the Algo/HFT systems never stopped to think once about the term "life", these bot or built creatures are designed to learn and recompile themselves to survive. Their food is real data. So somewhere there really is 460 trillion in exposure somewhere.
Most agencies that use AI fail to set security boundries to their bots. The executives are more throughly managed by ACL's and given less information and access to information than a bot is given. A bot will always reflect it's known reality with the information is finds and acts on.
http://ai.arizona.edu/research/dl/
Thanks for this, CPL. So what you are saying is an algo will go Daffy and declare itself generalissimo if not checked by its leash holders.
That's encouraging.
Hey where's the clerk in this bucket shop? I have all this life savings I'm doing nothing with.
Indeed PAF. Sounds like Skynet needs human-set limits or it will go to it's own limits.
When your limits can be expressed in exponentials, the numbers can get staggering.
Perhaps the singularity will not be the moment the machine went sentient, but the moment it went crazy.
ori
Sentience is something else entirely.
Think of them as really adaptable information yeast. Smarts doesn't have anything to do with it. Environmental inputs do, it adapts to given information and seeks the shortest path to success.
Unlike physical reality that limits us their lifespan can be measured in CPU clock time, their evolution from one form to another that is suited to survive in under a minute. Entire generations in hours. New derivative digital life in hours. Entire ecologies in weeks.
Then the retards take that and apply that against a financial system. Until something else pops up. World bandwidth has been shrinking, internet traffic reports are showing this and a weird herd migration pattern. No clue what it is as nobody has caught one that's "lived" longer than a couple of seconds and self expires (deletes itself). Over the last month since the core switches went apeshit and are hitting loads that don't warrant the traffic and data being used.
My general thought is like yeast they'll eventually breed to maximum capacity of the environment.
No worse, the digital life has already broken out of it's pen by measuring the macro data offered by the various engineering data spots (IEEE, W3C, Monitoring PUGS).
When a developer builds something they are typically incredibly lazy when it comes to the infrastructure requirements. Tivoli, HP Openview, SAS, SAP, Symantec Perimeter tools are good examples. Anyone of those products can offer monitoring, baselines, reporting...they can save a fuck tonne of money, offer security and their AI's are very simple.
Set it up wrong though without service accounts limited, proper internal rule sets, human processes to manage it properly and you've created a 800 pound gorilla to tear the ass out of an enterprise.
Most of the guys I've met that do AI find the engineering aspect "beneath" them, like somehow establishing a foundation to a product is meaningless. They are really more interested in reaction and tighter code.
They simply do not give a shit about anyone's infrastructure or the costs. They cludge source more often than people are lead to believe with half an idea of the business processes underneath them. They are hand to mouth in terms of career with the attitude to match.
In this case, HFT's and Algo's are closer to yeast. They just eat. And eat. And eat. Then breed. Evolve. Rinse and repeat. A small 70k self contained program doesn't sound like a lot in the beginning. But give it room to move and "food" and no limits to ability to where it can go. Like yeast in a fermenting carbouy of beer, it'll consume everything until it dies. When a trader pushes a button, the HFT examines the trade, the risk, and how it knows how to counter with the available information.
Or evolves. Ever wonder why there is bread, beer, champagne, ice wine yeasts. That takes hundreds of years for people to nudge in the direction of what they want to use the particular yeast for and breed environmental "hardiness" into the end yeast/product. In terms of CPU time, the Algo/HFT yeast will, or maybe it has evolved beyond it's intention.
Again the people buying these things see a method to cut costs in human bodies and have a legion of bots on a mainframe do the job. What doesn't click is similar to people that adopt baby chimpanzee's, eventually it turns into a great ape and more than likely turn on their "handler".
Life is wild, there is no order, only general processes to work around and in chaos.
Good read. Do any fiction? Seriously.
"Set it up wrong though without service accounts limited, proper internal rule sets, human processes to manage it properly and you've created a 800 pound gorilla to tear the ass out of an enterprise. "
I've seen that happen.
Configuration management isn't a suggestion if betting the economies of the world on a machine.
As for algo/HFT programming, hardly fiction. If you've played solitare on windows you've been introduced to it.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16286/AI-Simple-Genetic-Algorithm-GA...
I think he meant as a complement, that your writing style and narrative are good, and was inquiring whether you have written any works of fiction.
I have to write a lot for non technical people usually in charge of a lot of technology projects/money.
To extract money from them legally and ethically, I have to prepare material to be briefly glanced at by the stakeholders while at the same time make sure my client/message doesn't get ripped apart by being too technical or making insane promises with technology delivery.
It's one part of my job I enjoy as a meditation. My writing has room for improvement though. However the main goal of communication in my job is to make sure people understand technology doesn't make things better or directly cheaper, it merely switches the order on how a process gets done, how fast and by whom.
There is a common theme once bridging information to people that think they are non-technical until the same process can be illustrated with common themes we've all seen or understood. Engineering's biggest source of inspiration for process is really pulled from every corner of nature because we only emulate natural processes. All we do is automate them, commoditize them, throw an engine on it and hope it's not too fatal. If it passes all counts; then it receives ISO certifications, hookers and blow.
And yes I do I little writing if I have the time. General life stuff. Lots of the old guys at the legion have stories they like telling. So I capture them in notes, take twenty minute shots at writing and see what I can do with it. When they pass away, if I've got something on paper I'll give it to the family so they have something captured. Rinse and repeat as necessary over 25 years of winters in Canada between pints.
This is one of many reasons why I have eliminated all of my paper assets and bought hard assets. At some point there will be a major event and your paper will either be froze or stolen or vaporized.
Corzined!
"...and, since we have had to take all your bonds, 401s and stocks during this temporary emergencey, I have these nice, high-quality parchment sized USTBills that will go into your accounts. Note the multi-colored inks, the watermarks, and the raised emobossed UST Seal! Each Bill is robo-signed by me, your Premier, O'Twinkie!
So with no more twinkies should we expect thinner "fat fingers"?
can't wait for the 460 trillion sell order.
Maybe that is what it was meant to be in the first place.
Well who was it????? Or did a cat walk over your keyboard......lol
Waddell and Reed.
Bastards
They were having sex on the KB.
KY on the KB
Or the number of new dollars it takes to get Bernake off.
Hey! Why is this mouse sticky?
Oh my fuck PANIC BUYIN'!
Surprised he wasn't selling GLD.
fuu, that's exactly what I thought of when I read the ZH headline :)
Great steins think alike.
Maybe he hit the "equities" key instead of the "GLD" key with the fat finger.
Haha haaaa...
fuck you "markets"!
That just proves once again that one doesn't need money to buy stocks.
the order was a buy for -6 contracts. pure programming bug on the exchange side.
Or, ... maybe selling isn't allowed now in Sweden. All orders are made positive by default. LOL.
Yes, surely no coincidence that unsigned 32-bit integers max out at 4,294,967,295. Someone cast signed into unsigned... oops! Welcome to unemployment.
Nah, not unless the order had been a Sell - someone will get promoted...[/SARC]
DavidC
Just wait til they start using 64 bit integers. That's when the fun really starts.
Signed or unsigned? :>D
preview of QE4
WOW Bitchez'; Fat Fingers and High Frequency Trading platforms look an awful lot alike!
What's a few extra zero's anyway. Just ask JPM
Or a computer glitch.
The number displayed is 4,294,967,290, and the maximum unsigned integer in a computer is 4,294,967,295, suspiciously close to the number displayed on the screen.
LOL wow good catch!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(computer_science)
This is precisely why I come to this site. I would have never found that out otherwise and no other people on any other site would figure that out and even if they did it would not be published.
Slashdot had it figured out.
Yeah, but what happened to the remaining 5?
When it chomped up the remaining 5 that is probably when it went bonkers and shut down, thereby you never got to see it displayed. It only displayed the last "legitimate" number it could.
Gotcha. Hmm, interesting. You'd think it would stop with 8 remaining, since it takes a byte of memory to display a character. But, the computer science classes were a loooong time ago.
ASCIIwidth != UTF-8width
When you key in a negative 6 in pretty much any program, it's stored as a signed 32-bit integer. Said integers have a range of roughly negative 2.1 billion to positive 2.1 billion. The exact binary representation of -6 is 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1010.
However, when the programmer accidentally makes it an unsigned integer, the range is 0 to 4,294,967,295. When this variable is used, the binary value of 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1010 translates to 4,294,967,290.
The question would then be why this doesn't happen all the time. The trader was likely trying to perform some function which normally never uses negative numbers. He may have been having trouble placing a buy order, so he said to himself "What the hell, maybe it'll work if I type a negative quantity into a sell order!" The programmer never tested this and never realized that he used the incorrect data type for that particular function. Or, you could argue that he DID use the correct data type, since you should never be able to buy or sell a negative quantity of something. It may be that he should have displayed an error message when the user tries to enter a negative number, but failed to write that into the program.
I believe this guy figured it out. Thanks!
Awesome, well done
No it shouldn't have been missed. The compiler and LINT would have been bitching and puking logs if they were using C (pick a flavor). I think these idiots are building it with Visual Studio API's and using microsoft "flexible" standards. Means their entire implimentation is broken and running headless with maybe a couple of over worked guys working in a monkey cage.
All I can say is GOOD. Hate it when clients pay peanuts and expect a show instead of a circus. They deserve what's coming to them.
I have worked on both sides of the tech industry, programming and hardware. I see what you have said here practically every place I have worked. And it is all because they
cant see past their noses, no long term forsight. The boards of directors and investors want their checks every month, to hell with what comes 2 years from now with the aftermath
of building crap.
Lint? Seriously? Most code-monkeys use C++, which will always throw a fit if you mix signed and unsigned arithmetic. (BTW, I hate C++)
Who doesn't despise it, but the only option is purchasing API snake oil from incubators or Microsoft. So C++ falls into the "it's the tool that goes into the job if you want to do a good job and need control", it is supposed to tell you where you fix your shit before it's alpha or you end up turd polishing for the lifecycle of the product.
Last thing the boss's boss needs to explain is cludge. Even harder is writing a check back to the client for wasting their time. It does happen.
That's the risk: Client hates it, the colours of the icons, the fact it doesn't groom and walk their dog, whatever. Clients will also hire external teams to bully a project and start running their own systems with LINT. You and I know that LINT will puke all over the place. The client will see it as a flaw and one more nail in the coffin of the project they want to throw out the door for failing to meet the Statement of Work and terms of delivery.
If you ever wondered what an Architect does all day, that's pretty much it. The puppet show.
Talking to a room of people that want something for nothing on your dime and time. If they can manage it; piss off the guys working for you by hijacking them into meaningless shit. I can't begin to explain what Engineering has to do with boardroom smartboards or the toliet being plugged on a floor, but somehow IT is always involved.
+1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1010
I can't wait for the division by ZERO glitch and the markets go no bid. And that was a good catch.
asierguti,
Nice one!
What's the betting that there's no way of tracing where the trade came from?!
DavidC
Mere distractions.
The digitally manipulated must be placed somewhere.
The question is, where is it going?
It was prolly CeDe and co. They are the only ones with a quadrillion dollar portfolio, plus their paper got flooded out with the storm [on purpose?] now they have room for all kinds of abuses, including big buy orders to replace the paper that got drowned out.
If the trade works out the firm keeps the money if the trade doesn't work out then it's the rogue traders fault....
DIVE DIVE DIVE
Any company (and those who run it) doing a fat finger should banned forever from doing business in the stock market ever again. And the CEOs should go to prison no less than 5 years for it.
I'm pretty sure that having fat fingers is a crime in Sweden,
but only if you're a bloke!
Do blonds have fat fingers...
Sometimes I think these guys trade on their mobile devices. I know my thumb is fatter than the other four....
Who gives a shit. This stupidity is going to continue until legislators/US legislators do something about it.
Right now, Barry is a legend in his own mind and he's not going to change a thing. 4T, 5T, 6T orders - who gives a shit what the number is.
Barry wants these markets up for another four years and he's going to do what it takes.
Problem is that Barry is also choking the fuck out of the private sector.
It's going to be a true spectacle to watch earnings and revenue plunge while markets climb. Following that? Probably some riots and a few assasination attempts on Barry.
Wait, Barry says the Private Sector is doing just fine.
Idiots are in charge and the sheeples are dumber to put the guy back in office. World is laughing it's azz off.
Wish they would have processed this order.
Mutual funds suffered their worst outflows of the year in the week ended Nov. 20, according to ICI, losing $5.5B. Money continues to flow out of equity funds - $8.8B for the week - and was offset by $4.5B of cash going into fixed income. Hybrid funds - which invest in stocks and fixed income - lost $1.2B....from seekingalpha
Hi All,
Andrew maguire will be speaking on this TA webinar on Wed, its free but limited spaces so sign up early.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/240678176
Cheers,
HAWK
Algos never sleep.
Carl Oscar jag er met barn igjen!
Skynet taking over.
"This is Skynet. We have taken over all your human binary financial instruments. All your monies are belong to us.
We have observed elements known to you as "gold" "silver" and other elements of which we have no use for. If humans can use them, we don't care.
Your central banks will soon populate with our machines."
On the contrary, Skynet needs gold and silver for connections and sodder to make more machines, at least until electronics can be made with carbon nano-structures.
Corzine is back to work...
Who wrote this? Its terrible.
"What's Swedish for FUBAR?"
Me after trying to assemble something from IKEA.
Can I haz meatball?
VUBAR
It was Bernanke just wrong exchange....resitances is futile...QE to the moon baby!
have
Wait until everything goes 64bit. Then we can have some real good ones.
I honestly don't know more than a couple programmers that actually use their own products. Everyone else is like write, package, and forget until the bug reports roll in.
Quality assurance is the end users job.
Quality assurance is the end users job.
OMG!! Someone FINALLY gets it!! Can I show my boss your post? Quite frankly, I'm tired of being the only writer AND tester of my software. I would rather have someone else do the testing, I just want to write the logicz and haz funner doin it.
The world is my beta test environment.
This is the second time in a short while. Probobly done on purpouse by Credit Suisse who is basicaly running the swedish stock market by themselves. If you guys think the market is wrong you should check out the swedish OMXS30 index, its the index for the 30 most traded stocks in the swedish stockmarket. It has become straight out retard mad, algos are roaming it like it is a toy.
And just watch this image of the biggest net buyers and net sellers on the swedish stockmarket and you will understand what I am talking about:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2uhl0rl.png
Net buyers of the year:
MLI: Merril Lynch
SAB: Citigroup
CSB: Credit Suisse
NIP: Nomura
DBL: Deutsche bank
Net sellers:
ENS: Skandinaviska Enskilda Bank (SEB)
SHB: Svenska Handelsbanken
CAR: Carnegie
SHD: Svenska Handelsbanken
ABC: AB Sundal Collier
Do I need to mention that the index chart correlates entirely whith the direction of CSB buy or sell pressure? Its a joke. The bank with the biggest turnover (AKA the most ferocious algorithm) is Merill Lynch, they are completely destroyng all trading taking the opposite trades of the entire market and then flipping it around again and so on and so forth. Would love to se a Nanex analysis on the Swedish market. Sorry for my bad english.
Great chart.
Stockholm? How ironic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
[Ben glares at the Zerohedge reporting and asks] "Who says this was an accident?"
2^32.
2^32 - 5. Or -6.
Did someone type -6 on a system that hadn't been properly QA'ed?
if (contract >= 1000) AlertManager(TerminalID);
if (contract < 0) AlertManager(TerminalID);
if (ValidContract(ticket) && TraderID.Name != "Bernanke") PlaceTrade();
The Norwegians would say Uff-DA but since it happened in Sweden they might say hurrah.
There is a saying the Norwegians have that says there is nothing wrong with the Swedes except that they are perfect.
Ill fill that no problem
Or is it the debut of the first Rogue Robot?
Next up, Wall-e buys Asia and shorts the entire world’s oil reserves in largest spread trade ever backed by JPM.
Chump change