The term comes from the idea of a clumsy, ‘fat-fingered’ typist, who presses extra keys without being aware of it.<\/p>\n
As the practice of high-frequency trading continues to become more widespread, concerns are growing that erroneous trades carried out by ‘algos gone wild’—a sort of digitally amplified version of the ‘fat finger’ phenomenon—could cause a market crash at Internet speed, a meltdown that no one could stop. Two recent market glitches could provide a preview of what’s to come.<\/p>\n
On November 14, 2007 at 3:20pm one of Credit Suisse’s trading algorithms suddenly went haywire, and, in a few moments, sent hundreds of thousands of bogus requests to the exchange. This sudden surge of requests, which were cancellations for a large batch of orders that the machine had never actually sent out, acted like a denial-of-service attack on some parts of the New York Stock Exchange. The messages clogged the tubes and caused parts of the exchange to freeze up, affecting trading in 975 stocks.<\/p>\n
After an extensive investigation, the NYSE assessed a $150,000 fine for Credit Suisse’s “failing to adequately supervise the development, deployment and operation of a proprietary algorithm, including a failure to implement procedures to monitor certain modifications made to the algorithm.”<\/p>\n
The exchange’s filing, released a little over a week ago, has the details of precisely what drove the algorithm haywire—it was a trader who accidentally double-clicked an icon in a trading program’s interface, when he should’ve single-clicked. No, I am not making that up.<\/p>\n
(View the rest of the article at How a stray mouse click choked the NYSE & cost a bank $150K<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The term comes from the idea of a clumsy, ‘fat-fingered’ typist, who presses extra keys without being aware of it. As the practice of high-frequency trading continues to become more widespread, concerns are growing that erroneous trades carried out by ‘algos gone wild’—a sort of digitally amplified version of the ‘fat finger’ phenomenon—could cause a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[12,19,64],"tags":[65,115,202,212],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2376"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.schollnick.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}