well - i'm not sure what you mean - but i am still a little dreamer - and i have the vision of some kind of fairness. no - fairness is not the right word - but i didn't find a better one.
The conspiracy theories would be a bit more credible if someone did the math: How much buying in stocks and alternative markets would the "fat-fingered firm" have to do in order to make their devious plan pay off? How much risk would they be undertaking in the process? Where could they "safely" presume that the trade would be busted? How far would the be able to presume the other markets would go, and then would recover?
It would have to involve collusion between two firms. If the fat finger mistake was investigated, the first thing that would be checked would be the trading records of the firm making the mistake to see if they conducted any trades in the ES or related/sympathetic securities to profit from the mistake.
For what it's worth. I sent a complaint to CME. If anything else, it will jam their inbox with all the complaints that are hopefully swarming in. Oh, I also put a link to this thread in the email.
What if they bought back QQQ, SPY, DIA just to breakeven or limit their losses? Hopefully there is some financial penalty to these fat finger mistakes. Maybe firms shouldn't hire people that look like this: http://www.designstop.com/free_stuff/clipart/kids/assets/gurl4.gif
they might even profit from their "erroneous" trade itself - if it's covering gets not busted - who knows. and if it's a common thing that exchanges declare those actions as "erroneous" - as long as one of their member firms that caused the incident declares that it was just a mistake - it would maybe be possible to try it. first sell the one market - then the other one - cover somewhere near the bottom - then go long and ride it up again - why not? i don't claim it happens this way - but i wouldn't be surprised if it did - tell me one thing THEY would not do for the money??
Could just be that the employee making the mistake had a friend open an account with another firm and place a big buy order in the Dow Futures when it happened or maybe even a big buy order in the S&P big contracts in the pit, which may explain why the pit didn't trade near where the mini's did. When it happened on the 3rd, it sounded a little fishy even then to me. But now twice, and I really think someone has figured out a way to profit from this stuff and they are exploiting it. I agree that they should have to tell the world who it was that made the error, what trader and what firm.
It would be a good topic for some grad student's thesis - profiting from out-of-the-envelope market events. In addition to doing the basic back-testing and analyzing price reactions, they could outline the conspiracy scenario by which a single firm would manipulate such an event, and calculate exactly what the firm would have to presume. They could consider collusion. My strong suspicion is that the weird-ass events that typically get busted introduce too many variables into the equation to make it practicable - even without considering the potential legal and civil jeopardy. On the other hand, buying/covering on the spike down and especially the sympathy moves would be business as usual for many small and large traders alike.