Trade Showing Up That Was Never Made

Discussion in 'Order Execution' started by traderTX, Feb 13, 2009.

  1. I trade commodity futures for a living, and have never had this problem until today. I opened up my electronic account statement tonight, and found that I was holding a very sizeable (for my account anyway) position in March corn. The trade showed to have been executed today at the market close, through my electronic trading platform. However, I never made this trade. At first I thought I had made an error and accidentally entered this MOC order, so I double checked my "executions" and "orders" files on my platform to make sure. Sure enough, no orders were ever placed on the platform, and it shows no execution ever took place. What is also odd is that this trade is for double the amount of contracts that I normally submit at one time (as per my position limit sheet provided to my broker's RM department). Apparently even the RM guys didn't catch this trade, which leads me to definitely conclude there was no way it was entered from my platform. Luckily I called my broker and he was still around, and he confirmed that the trade did happen on Globex and not the floor, and he also confirmed it originated from my IP address (not sure how they determined that but thats what he said). I am the only one who has access to my computer, and I was trading all day. Obviously its too late to get the trade busted, and its not a big deal as far as P/L goes unless corn gaps huge on the open, but it does have me concerned about how this happened and if it could happen again. Has anyone else had a similar experience?? If so how did you resolve it / what ended up being the issue?? Thanks in advance guys.
     
  2. One day while I was staring at my platform, around 16:04, I saw in the messages window a fill, a buy of $40K worth of USNA. I'd never even looked at that stock. There was no message about the order having being placed, so I was pretty sure it was an error on the broker's end and not due to a hacker on my PC.

    I immediately called the broker, but sadly they didn't do anything about it that day. I briefly considered closing the position, as $40K was a significant chunk of my available margin, but decided not to since it would just complicate things when (if) they fixed the error.

    I called again a bit more frantic the next morning, and after the expected series of questions ("do you share your password with anyone else?") they determined that it was someone else's phoned-in order that was mistyped. The person who mistyped it called me personally to apologize.

    Long story short, there is a good chance that it is someone else's order at the same brokerage as you, which someone fat-fingered, and if you want to close the position make sure the broker knows this and won't penalize you if they eventually have to undo the opening trade.
     
  3. yes, they've advised me not to close it out until they get the mess straightened out, although they have eliminated the possibility of it being someone else's phoned in order, because all of their phone orders matched up, and none of them at the price I was excecuted at. They are looking at a few scenarios right now, all which bewilder me, as I'm not much of a tech guy. I will give my broker props though, he has been working with me on it all last night and today, at least he's not sitting on his ass!
     
  4. _PD_

    _PD_

    A duplicate order happened to me a few months back. It was a software glitch on their end, but try convincing them that. Took about a week of harassment from me to get it fixed.

    In the end it all worked out, but even though I had the word of a tech that it could happen, they weren't going to fess up to it, blaming me for several days. I was instructed to use their software in a certain way, avoiding the bug, which they never admitted to, nor I assume ever fixed.

    Those bastards.
     
  5. were you using a 3rd party front end or your broker's? My broker is telling me they've isolated the problem to either my Ninja Trader execution platform (I run two seperate ones) or just a mess up at Globex...but I strongly doubt that Globex is the problem. Meanwhile, we've opened up an investigation ticket with Ninja, and also sent an e-mail to GCC, but the trade cleared, so I doubt GCC can do anything about it as far as busting it goes.