Oil’s negative pricing broke Interactive Brokers software

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/oil-crash-busted-a-broker-s-computers-and-inflicted-huge-losses

Fair enough for the errors on IB software, that’s their part of the fault.
But the examples they give in the article all seem like some naive traders buying what they don’t really understand.
I don’t really get why IB should cover for (all of) their losses; but that’s just me and my part of ignorance.

Did you get the part where it says that they fed him, displayed and made him trade on (not just slightly “off” but) totally wrong prices?

“Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him”

…which seems to be quite easy on IBKR’s platform.

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Yes I did.
I don’t see they stated anywhere whether he/they had “live pricing” paid for (which doesn’t matter really in this case as IB admits they failed); but he also holds a piece of responsibility for not looking anywhere else, e.g. the free yahoo finance (relatively) live prices.
You cannot put all of the blame on the tool.

And also, what’s that last guy “trading on behalf of his 2 friends” - isn’t that against the T&C of IBKR? :slight_smile:

Feeling a bit criticising today. :grin:
Might be wrong.

These investors still got wiped out. IBKR may need to cover for any additional loss caused by their software glitch (for example, the interface would not accept negative prices, which made it impossible to sell at -1$ even if the investor had access to alternative data feeds and wanted to close the position before it went down all the way to -40$.

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Labeled a “day trader”, and having made multiple orders over a span of 40 minutes, it seems outlandish to assume he hadn’t.

Depends on the account type, doesn’t it?

They’ve literally got more than a dozen different types/setups of accounts.

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