I don't believe IB will automatically liquidate equities during pre or post-market. I believe the auto-liquidation for equities only occurs between 9:30am-4:00pm. Please correct me if I am wrong. Not sure how it works for futures.
Often people do gripe for arbitrary reasons, but this is beyond the normal scope of most of the bickering...I remember the early days of Globex when this did occur more often...At that time, the electronic contract really was the wild west...But, at some point, with the volume and liquidity of the minis nowadays, its just really bad news that this stuff can be triggered like this...Moral of the story, imo, is to really watch one's backside after the cash closes...Sure, these spikes can and do occur in the middle of the day if the FOMC does their ambush, but the majority of the time I have seen these spikes occur in the NQ, and now the ES, right after that cash closes and things go haywire...
However, wouldn't all those free money guys be upset if their trades were busted, and they were left hanging long or short. If there really was some sort of glitch, and not real volume driving it up then the arbs wouldn't have made any difference. Wasn't the pit open? kp
Oopps right the pit stays open till 4:15. So where were those arbs? If it was a glitch, I'd like to here what kind it was.
so next day and we still don't know what happened? If, as the CME spokesman opined, no one did anything stupid to set this off, I am concerned about the next time someone decides that well, that move was just too large so we will bust everyone's trade. In commodities those types of decisions have an uncanny ability to occur when some exchange big shot is in deep shit. What we seem to know now is that a big order set off a cascade of buy stops. The limit lock was off because of the time. Perphaps they should leave them on for 24 hours. That would be fairer than just arbitrarily picking a number. CME needs to get a handle on this pronto.