High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

Post by fahimulhaq » Thu, Oct 01, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

Post by deckar01 » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:47 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #2

Doesn't matter how much money is involved or the quality of a team, someone somewhere will always do an oopsie. Maybe that particular 'code' should have had a little comment such as // used by ISO stuff do not delete Commenting tricky / non-obvious code is well recommended.

Post by azinman2 » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:06 AM UTC

deckar01 wrote: post #3

keyle wrote: post #2

Doesn't matter how much money is involved or the quality of a team, someone somewhere will always do an oopsie. Maybe that particular 'code' should have had a little comment such as // used by ISO stuff do not delete Commenting tricky / non-obvious code is well recommended.

Some unit tests would be nice. Maybe even a special folder full of tests that know when laws have been broken.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:28 AM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #6

...I'm missing something here. How do they not know how much they've asked to trade and not heard back on yet? Wouldn't they have to track that, to not try to trade the same exact shares the same exact way a bunch of times? Is their local system maybe just more synchronous than I'm assuming would be possible?

Post by mathgenius » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:49 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #5

deckar01 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some unit tests would be nice. Maybe even a special folder full of tests that know when laws have been broken.

Probably exists now, and not before. Writing this software would be very scary for me -- I'm confident in my work for the most part but I'm only human. To then let a "for-loop" go wild making thousands of trades per second on the entire market with real money against other high frequency traders no less.. man... you gotta be really really really really sure of your code!