Since the debacle, none of the RELEVANT points have surfaced about Knight Capital: 1) They outsourced a critical piece of software 2) The software was poorly designed - no circuit breakers - no order cancellation panic button - no close-all-trades panic button - no warning messages of excessive losses Unforgiveable....and that big mouth analyst Brad Hintz is such a jerk, all he does is blame HFT. He didn't admit to poor quality, or poor testing, or anything related to the heart of the problem. Total BS from him. And Mary Shapiro remains clueless. What a country ! We don't "make" things here any longer, but we sure output a lot of B.S. That's our new commodity !
hehehe, dialogue from Mission Impossible. Ving Rhames to Cruise when referring to the hack of (sic) NATO Ghostcom.
That A-Hole who ran Knight didn't ONCE fess-up and say "we made a mistake outsourcing this vital piece of software". That'll never happen, will it ?
Bloomberg tonite: one expert gets on to say that HFT has increased liquidity enormously. Wisely, he indicated this did not make it easy to profit in the market. Barry Ritholtz then said "HFT hollows-out market structure". WOW, WHAT ANOTHER LOAD OF B.S. !! What does that mean Barry ? Hint: he doesn't know, but it sounded GOOD !
Knight had the tools necessary to stop this in its tracks. The problem is they had a broken command structure. The one guy who could unequivocally hit the kill switch wasn't available due to a personal issue. Nobody else was willing to step up and shoulder the responsibility in a clear "Hero or Zero" situation. A bunch of those folks have now lost their jobs, as is appropriate. IMO the entire chain of command should to be examined, as there is something clearly f'ed up about a corporate culture that gridlocks inside its own head like this. A hammer isn't going to scare a nail, unless someone is willing to swing it.
That would make sense. Did you hear this from a reliable source, or can you give a link to the story, if any? That would explain why they kept going for 45 minutes, which isn't easy for me to understand absent something like what you just described.