[iskander]

They weren't taking long-term speculative positions, their short-term market making had a major bug in which instead of buying low and selling high it was doing the opposite (thus losing a small amount on each pair of trades). For more details read Nanex's blog (http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3522.html).

So, they launched a busted market making algorithm, lost a ton of money and no one is going to bail them out.

[jonah]

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

[wtracy]

"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!

[SkyMarshal]

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.

[davidmr]

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.

[bjork]

I love dumb coders!