Trading places
bryanbrattlof: >In 2015, a junior employee at Deutsche Bank whose superior was on vacation confused gross and net amounts while processing a trade, causing a payment to a US hedge fund of $6bn, orders of magnitude higher than the correct amount.
Wouldn’t you love to be that junior employee before the *nice* conversation with the boss when he found out on his vacation?
Edit: after some reflection, I wouldn’t want to have to wait for the phone call where I have to explain the difference between net and gross to my boss who already knows I can’t tell the difference
ilazul: If a junior employee is doing this because his boss is away at vacation, and there’s no checks from the higher up… that’s on the company, not the guy.
AdrianBlake: I once did a similar thing and ordered something like 1500 hammers instead of one hammer at 1500p
We were able to return it though
But not before I got a phone call from the shop floor asking what the fuck a truck full of hammers was doing here.
Edit. Me no words good. Me no numbers good. But me recieve hammers good.
FireOccator: A regular day in EVE.
SlackJawCretin: I was once talking to a friend who works at a major firm in NYC about our jobs. I told him how my boss freaked out about 10 dollars missing from the register, and he told me how he misplaced a decimal point once and lost 500 thousand dollars but no one noticed
916hotdogs: Some say he’s still doing this today on etherdelta
dollarsandcents101: My finance prof had a story about forgetting to close out a commodity futures position on cattle. He got a call from the distributor asking where he wanted his 200 cows delivered to and had to spend a couple of days figuring out where to unload them.
YourBlogSucksToo: TIL not to trade on the Tokyo exchange. There are regs in place that allow goofs like this to be reversed in the States
Apps4Life: Another japanese company did 610,000 share mistake a few years later (this time mixing up 1 share for 610,000 yen). What’s with Japanese firms and the number 610,000?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizuho_Securities#Massive_sale_order_of_J-COM_share_incident
ElonComedy: Pobody’s Nerfect.
TalonsAlight: r/tifu
f_bastiat: Almost sold 4 bitcoins for 1,690 last week instead of 16,900, fortunately i typed in my password wrong and had to resubmit. Would have been a tragedy.
simoncox: I’m currently writing an automated trading system (that will send orders to market without direct intervention from a human). Writing checks in to stop these types of errors is the single scariest part of the process.
_DavidPuddy_: This happens all the time, to lesser degrees.
On stock trader sites you can watch the stocks sell in real time, and sometimes you’ll see a sale with inverse numbers. People fuck up.
Triple check those numbers before you hit “sell”. It’s hard sometimes, because people are in a rush to sell while the price is at a certain number, but those extra few seconds of verification might save your ass.
SevereHyperbole: Oops my bad.
DoctorWaluigiTime: Reminds me of a [bash.org submission of mine](http://bash.org/?663126).
umiotoko: I worked for a brokerage in Japan when the Dentsu trade happened. Not my firm, but it was an overseas HQ brokerage. This was an IPO and the offering price was so high (in Yen, and in digits) that we had completed a software project to update all the trading systems for Japan equities ahead of the IPO to support it.
I asked our old-timer Tokyo Stock Exchange expert about safeguards, the usual safeguard was more than x% of yesterday’s close would trigger an alert, but with an IPO there was no yesterday price, so no alert. They pulled the sell order as soon as they noticed the error, but had to honor the bids received. Could have bankrupted the brokerage if the entire lot went through.
Word on the street was the trader and his boss and that bosses boss were on the street (unemployed) within three hours.
Source: worked back office tech support for a different brokerage when this happened.
YESMYFRlENDS: Doesn’t basically every site give you a warning if you order too deep into the book now? The shitty software is at fault here
Macabilly: All of these people are now kids at /r/wallstreetbets
the_real_grinningdog: I have a friend who used to work inthe City of London in a very senior job. Apparently one of the guys on his team did a huge currency deal but, forgot to press “Enter” to actually finalise the trade (I think it was more complex than that but, for simplicity)
When they all came back from lunch this “good deal” had turned into a £40 million liability. It was all hands to the pumps, and lots of panic, to do tons of small deals with slim margins so they could break even on the day and cover their arses
Living_Granger: I love reading stories on fat finger mistakes, whenever it happens to me, I notice it within seconds and take the loss or profit. It’s quite common in trading than you’d think.
What’s worse is if you don’t realize the error as quickly as possible.
SirMikan: I say Helsinki and you think Geneva? That’s 40,000 Deutsch-Marks, Bob! You’re f–kin’ fired!