I worked in algo trading for years, eventually got out because quite frankly the level of risk I was carrying on my shoulders everyday for what I was being paid were just way out of whack, I at least personally never got the huge pay days that people talked about until after I left finance for more pure tech. Interestingly, I worked at Knight and my team pioneered trying to blow up the firm, but that was in 2004, and things were much friendlier- instead of front page news, it was a small blurb on page 3 of the markets section of the WSJ.
Anyway, I still have friends in that business. It hasn't really changed, they have too few people covering systems that are quite complex and while there are checks and such, no one really understands things entirely from end to end in detail that can prevent all problems.
I will never invest directly in an investment bank- either through carelessness or maliciousness I could have easily caused a 9 figure loss, if not more, and there were probably a thousand other people in the same position.
When I read the detailed writeup around this a few years back, I think by far the biggest issue was reusing a tag that had been previously used to denote which strategy to use. I understand why they may have chosen to do so, at the Big Bank I was working at, getting a new fix tag to be passed through all the layers properly would involve at least two other teams and coordinating releases and probably several weeks worth of meetings. If you just reuse an old value you can avoid all that since everything is already set up.
Anyway, I still have friends in that business. It hasn't really changed, they have too few people covering systems that are quite complex and while there are checks and such, no one really understands things entirely from end to end in detail that can prevent all problems.
I will never invest directly in an investment bank- either through carelessness or maliciousness I could have easily caused a 9 figure loss, if not more, and there were probably a thousand other people in the same position.
When I read the detailed writeup around this a few years back, I think by far the biggest issue was reusing a tag that had been previously used to denote which strategy to use. I understand why they may have chosen to do so, at the Big Bank I was working at, getting a new fix tag to be passed through all the layers properly would involve at least two other teams and coordinating releases and probably several weeks worth of meetings. If you just reuse an old value you can avoid all that since everything is already set up.