Knight Shows How to Lose $440 Million in 30 Minutes
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Talk about a bad day. In the mother of all computer glitches, market-making firm Knight Capital Group lost $440 million in 30 minutes on Aug. 1 when its trading software went, to use the technical term, kablooey. That’s four times its net income from all of 2011, and a lot more than most analysts were estimating as the day unfolded. Knight’s chief executive officer, Thomas Joyce, told Bloomberg the day after the disaster that the firm had “all hands on deck” to fix a “large bug” that had infected its market-making software.