Maybe not exactly what you mean by blackbox, but I remember R&W Technical was selling systems that were rocking for 1 -2 years. As I recall $5000 or so a system. Brokers were trading it for their accounts, as well as getting everybody and their cousin into them. Eventually it went South big and took back most if not all those profits. Ended up being a CFTC case against the company and owners. I think they get nailed big.
I cant help but laugh at this incident. I do feel bad for the trader but I just find this to be a hilarious goof up.
I heard a story from yrs ago before e-mini sp's were trading. Apparently some dude in the SP pit was leaving for a bit and threw his a pad over by his globex machine. The pad landed on the keyboard and started lifting all the SP offers.....apparently he ended up with a monster position before it was caught. The rumor is he got destroyed trying to get out.
Well, a similar well-known story was someone misheard a client's order for 80 contracts as 800, ended up selling 800 contracts (80 client, 720 prop). And then "black monday" (1987) hit, this person ended up making $10M in span of 1-2 days. That's a good mistake.
I work at a black box firm. Thank god there were no disasters here accept for an occasional lose of connection or something of that nature. There was an interesting thing last year the Friday after Thanks Giving day. It was a half a day and everything was slow as hell. I think NASDAQ closed at 1pm and ECNs continued to trade till 3. Although the nasdaq was closed it still continued to display orders even though you could not trade against them. Well someoneâs black box on a stock went crazy. From what I can guess it tried to trade against the nasdaq orders and was hitting both sides of the spread like crazy. The spread was a good 10 - 15 cents if not more. I jumped on it and apparently some other people who were still trading at this time. It must have lasted for at least 40 minutes, so there was obviously no one watching their system. I made a good piece of coin let me tell you. The black box that went crazy must have lost at least 1M but could have been as much as 5M. I guess they never factored in half day market days.