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by veyron 5137 days ago
He is complaining because he was sandbagged. He didnt know what his position was, and NASDAQ and MS both dropped the ball here.

You can vilify hedge funds till kingdom come, but it sounds here that this guy played by the rules and lost due to a circumstance that he didn't believe was fair.

If the opposite happened (price spiked) yet the same technology problems happened, you'd have a bunch of people complaining that they were over or under filled.

The complaints would not be justified if there was no confusion on his position.
3 comments
minimax 5137 days ago
What gets me is how mysterious it sounds, when there is a ton of obvious troubleshooting that should have happened... and probably did but I can't find reported anywhere.

Hedge fund places order. NASDAQ returns an order id.

Did that order show up in the market data feed?

Did they see that order get hit on the market data side?

Did they get an order accept?

Did they try to cancel?

What happened when they tried to cancel?

What actually happened? Did the orders really just get accepted and then go into a black hole?

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joezydeco 5137 days ago
Black hole sounds about right. Apparently NASDAQ's systems went completely quiet for 17 seconds centered around the 11:30am open of Facebook:

http://www.nanex.net/aqck/3122.html

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pbhjpbhj 5136 days ago
Looks crooked as anything.
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joezydeco 5136 days ago
Do you think NASDAQ shut their computers down? Were automated traders crippling the system? Perhaps something else?
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AznHisoka 5137 days ago
Problem is there's no rules. Noone got in any legal trouble over at NASDAQ. People do insider trading without getting caught. It's a rigged game.
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marshray 5137 days ago
I'd say former Nasdaq chairman Madoff got himself in a little legal trouble, though perhaps that was after he left Nasdaq.
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jyrkesh 5137 days ago
Except that it's their rules that they're following, and with HFT those rules are generally rigged to help out the big guys. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the system wouldn't have actually crashed if there weren't a bunch of Morgan Stanleys and the like trying to make a quick buck on day one.
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