[flagged]
How is high speed trading any more dubious than long term holding, or shorting, etc?
Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
11–20 of 294 posts
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#12Gotta imagine the sinking feeling that guy felt.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#13Honestly seems like the market itself should have safeguards against this kind of thing.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#14Ah, Knight Capital. The warning story for every quant trader / engineer.
This is what people don't realize when they say HFT (high frequency trading) is risk-free, leeching off people, etc.
You make a million every day with very little volatility (the traditional way of quantifying "risk" in finance) but one little mistake, and you're gone. The technical term is "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller (train)". Selling options is also like that.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#15Yes, the deployment practices were bad, but they still would have had an issue even with proper practices.
The real issue was re-using an old flag. That should have never been thought of or approved.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#16[flagged]
good to know that you don’t consent to what other people do with their money.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#17I'm not sure how automated deployments would have solved this problem. In fact, if anything, it would have magnified the impact and fallout of the problem.
Substitute "a developer forgot to upload the code to one of the servers" for "the deployment agent errored while downloading the new binary/code onto the server and a bug in the agent prevented the error from being surfaced." Now you have the same failure mode, and the impact happens even faster.
The blame here lies squarely with the developers--the code was written in a non-backwards-compatible way.
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#18I'm not sure how automated deployments would have solved this problem. In fact, if anything, it would have magnified the impact and fallout of the problem. Substitute "a developer forgot to upload the code to one of the servers" for "the deployment agent errored while downloading the new binary/code onto the server and a bug in the agent prevented the error from being surfaced." Now you have the same failure mode, an…
The blame here may indeed lie with whoever decided that reusing an old flag was a good idea. As anyone who has been in software development for any time can attest, this decision was not necessarily - and perhaps not even likely - made by a "developer."
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#19Ah, Knight Capital. The warning story for every quant trader / engineer. This is what people don't realize when they say HFT (high frequency trading) is risk-free, leeching off people, etc. You make a million every day with very little volatility (the traditional way of quantifying "risk" in finance) but one little mistake, and you're gone. The technical term is "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller (train)".…
I don't see how anything here goes against it leeching off people
Re: Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
#20[flagged]
They were market makers, which is different. They help so when you push sell on E*trade you actually get a price somewhat close to your order in relatively short time. No need to call up a broker who will route the order so a guy shouting on the floor.