The Reactor 4 Steam valve purged and you had a scram at the financial reactor today. Lucky for us the rods were able to drop down fast enough to moderate this sudden out of control fission reaction.
I took a body count amongst clients - especially the equity pairs traders; they actually made some money. Maybe just dumb luck without PG or MMM signals. Since we trade divergence and not convergence, if there was any lead time (say ten or fifteen minutes) at all with the price action of the stock they would have most likely been flat or even short the thing.
All of my spreads would have converged, had I sat through the carnage. The problem was that some legs moved so aggressively against others that it was hard to tell what was going on. I figured that most of my losses were tiny, so I cut everything and had a long in VXX. The movement was so asymmetric, it was almost luck of the draw. Some spreads hedged each other quite nicely. Others were good over-time, but short term dislocations were so extreme it was worrisome.
It's never a good time to be short vega. Over the course of time, death toll = 100%. Only a matter of time before these days or even parts of days come along. Margin liquidations always happen in the troughs... tapes may recover, naked shorts don't