The Flash Crash Trader - video [Archive]

Bullitt

12-11-2020, 12:06 PM

I remember that day. Bloomberg had some big interviews lined up and then PG when down to like .02 cents. They did an ad-hoc show the rest of the night on it.

Some people had stops wiped out for nothing, while others had limit order buys hit at a very low price. Turned out, most of the prices people got that were allowed to stick could have been had a few months later when the market corrected.

That trader was an idiot but he was the fall guy. It wouldn't have been nearly as bad if not for all the algorithmic traders doing the same thing. Some small fund in the mid-west was trying to hedge an enormous amount of futures trades on that day. The trades were to be executed by one of the large banks and instead of putting the orders in piecemeal, it went hog wild and set off a cascade of selling.