I disagree; capitalizing on mistakes is what we do. If I sell a market that is tanking, and someone else buys it from me, and it continues to go down; he made a mistake that I capitalized on.
"Blame" isn't the issue. I am responsible for the way I do business. A keyboard error is a clerical mistake. Perhaps I should have used that term instead. The final point really doesn't apply, I think.
Jeez, isn't that how we picked of market makers back in the early days of SOES? Nobody thought that was unethical but the Market Makers. Modern electronic daytrading was made popular by the "SOES Bandits" that used better software than the brokerage firms. Was that unethical too?
He has a different opinion of the market than you do. That is not a clerical error. An error in judgment perhaps, but that is a whole different ball game. Errors in judgment and their corrections are one way that traders get paid.
apples and oranges. Market makers were (and perhaps are) defrauding people by failing to live up to their titles. SOES trading was born as a free market solution to this abuse.
In our shop we do thousands of trades a day; every day we probably have ten to twenty entry errors that someone picks us off on; it is part of the business. We make a business of picking off MMs; and sometimes they pick us off ...