Tradestation konked out on me. I was up crazy crazy $ long VXX, then I was down crazy, crazy money. I panicked, started closing all my positions, and the very last thing I saw was that I was down $47. I have never seen anything like this before.
My platform was/is solid. Ninjatrader with zenfire. The only thing that bugged out was my iqfeed for forex data.
Periodic problems with TS all day. Locked up solid during crash. Probably my computer. Only have 1 gig RAM. Run a lot of TS windows, including long history and tick charts spanning several days.
The part that made me nervous was that the open/close pnl was way off. I was blind, and panicked out. It was oscillating between + a few thousand and - a few thousand, and I had no idea how to process it. So I just closed all positions.
This reminds me of the hardware threads where us who build super duty systems build quad core extreme boxes packed with as much DDR3 ram as we can fit in it, for these very events. My graphics card does 800fps! It just ain't gonna freeze. Trading Technologies never missed a tick today. In my opinion it is the best on the planet. Surviving most days does not cut it. You have to survive all days. I'm sure many got taken out today. For those of you who experienced system freezes, I feel for you. Back when I traded on java junk it happened to me all the time and so I made it my top priority to fix it. Fortunately I built my big box and got with TT in Dec 06 before the firestorm hit (right around the time Hank Paulson was saying "Subprime is CONTAINED". He seemed as scared as a two year old getting caught in the cookie jar and it was easy to tell he was lying. Good luck to everyone going forward.