
A fast paced stock exchange trips over itself - tmorton
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/a-fast-paced-stock-exchange-trips-over-itself/
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olalonde
Off-topic but related:

I infer from the articles that shares from a given company can be traded on
multiple stock exchanges. Can someone knowledgeable confirm that this is
right? In that case, why is the symbol for Apple "NASDAQ:AAPL" on Google
Finance? <http://www.google.com/finance?q=apple>

~~~
TimGebhardt
Yup, different types of financial products trade differently.

Stocks and bonds are "fungible" meaning that they can be traded on any
exchange that will let them, or even via private agreement which is called
Over The Counter (OTC).

Futures are not fungible, so contracts that are traded have to be traded on
the same exchange where you got them. The main reason for this is that each
futures has a contract specification that would need to be the same across
exchanges to be fungible: e.g. one contract of light-sweet crude oil is X U.S.
gallons of oil at Y quality... The other reason for this is that once the
contract has been traded the exchange (or your broker) assumes the
counterparty risk if you or your counterpart default on the contract -- so
keeping it all on a single exchange helps everyone keep track who sold what to
who.

Currencies are the worst: there is no central market. It's all inter-bank
agreements and probably the lightest regulated of the bunch. Retail customers
get hosed because it's absolutely legal for your broker to front-run your
order and skim a couple pennies off your trade.

~~~
joshu
fungible means that one item is the same as another. that they can be traded
across different exchanges because of that fungibility is not necessarily a
property of fungibility.

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zheng
_“My heart goes out to the guys,” said Larry Tabb, the founder and chief
executive of the Tabb Group, a financial research firm. “On the biggest day of
their corporate history, their own platform backfired.”_

Maybe I'm just reading too much into this, but this quote makes it sound like
Tabb really doesn't understand technology. The platform didn't "backfire", the
gods of finance didn't frown upon their venture, their code was incorrect.
This could have been avoided if they had found whatever bug they hit before
they went live. Don't get me wrong, I also feel bad for them because it sucks
to have a technical error cause anything more than debugging frustration, but
this was preventable.

~~~
delinka
Everything is preventable (or more correctly, predictable) when you know
everything about the system. If we knew everything about the quanta of the
universe, we'd know when solar flares and neutrinos and alpha particles were
going to affect our satellites and other electronics.

Since we don't know everything (not even everything about our own creations
like stock exchange markets and software systems), it becomes risk management.
After writing software for decades, I still have no idea whether these
circumstances were predictable let alone preventable, but perhaps they could
have spent more time considering the minutia of the system writing more tests
or whatever. Yes, the mistake was the fault of the humans designing and
implementing the system. But that could be said of any (non-natural, human-
made) system that fails.

At some point, someone has to decide that code should just be shipped. We're
not perfect enough as people to build bug-free systems. Risk comes with
releasing "unproven" code. And yes, it's embarrassing when the fit hits the
shan in front of the whole world. But I try to avoid becoming one of those
jaded people that can't tolerate mistakes on behalf of others nor can admit
their own.

~~~
dredmorbius
Heisenberg on line 1, or 2, I can't be certain, but he says you're wrong.

~~~
delinka
Heisenberg doesn't say that we wouldn't have absolute predictability or
control if we knew everything. He says we can't know everything. He's correct,
but that doesn't negate my statement.

~~~
dredmorbius
It does.

And it's compounded by quantum effects, multi-body problems, and emergent
phenomena.

Your requirement is that we 1) have absolute knowledge of a state of the
universe, and that 2) all later states can be predicted from this a priori
state.

Heisenberg says "you can never have absolute knowledge".

Numerous other elements argue that even where absolute knowledge _is_
available, it's not possible to predict future states with certainty, or in
less than real time.

So, no, everything is _not_ foreseeable.

Mind: some risks are predictable in a probabilistic way, though generally
these are good for saying that "in T' period of time, there's P probability of
X event occurring", though that's a far cry from saying that event X _will_
happen at time T. Much of my life revolves around clarifying the distinction
between these two statements.

An instance which comes to mind: Schneier's blog has mentioned that the 9/11
attacks were statistically probable given terrorism trends. As has been the
absence of similar-scale follow-on attacks since. Though with time, a similar
magnitude attack becomes a near certainty.

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velus
The efficient market has found the true value of BATS exchange at $0.038 per
share. :)

------
zotz
[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/bats-exchange-declares-self-
he...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/bats-exchange-declares-self-help-against-
itself)

