Sucks to be me, I sold at the beginning of the drop, but outside of the range of canceled trades -- now it's over my sell price, so I lose money for being quick :(.
If it was an error, this is the wrong way to think about things. People who had short positions with GTC limits deep into the range traveled also could have made a bundle. The limit orders would have executed damn fast.
If this was an error though, Nasdaq (or I assume the clearing houses more precisely) are doing exactly the right thing. Imagine if they didn't reverse the orders and it came out that a wall street firm happened to make 10% on a huge position today. With the way things are, someone would break out the guillotine.
(Edit: Bias Note: I've had May Put options at 118 on SPY since Tuesday. I did not close my position, so feel free to accuse me of being jealous ;))
Oh I'm not complaining that trades are being canceled. My thing is that if it hadn't been an error, then I would have been in a good position by selling early. But since it seems to have been an error, then my selling early disqualifies me from getting the order canceled, so I lose out for making what seemed like the right move at the time.
I always enjoy reading about the IT screw ups of very large corporations, because how can one of my clients be too angry with me in the rare situation when something goes awry on our servers? No one is immune from mistakes.
This is normal procedure. In the US, if a trade is an obvious rip-off to one party, the exchange usually cancels it. It's better to be horribly incompetent and off by 50% than marginally incompetent and make a trade that's 0.5% bad.
Yep. In most of the western world "accidental" trades are normally reversed over a handshake, japan has a much more mercenary attitude of "you screw up you lose".
