Stefan Mileschin

The Stockholm Stock exchange "went bananas" yesterday according to one tech expert when its machines started to invent their own trades.

The system suddenly started claiming that someone had bought more than 4.2 billion futures, to a unit price of almost $107,000. This is a lot of future for anyone other than a Jules Vern or Arthur C Clarke to have in one place and really screws up Stephen Hawking's theory about time.

If the computer were accurate you could buy that amount of time for nearly $460 trillion. .

One of the traders told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that it just goes to show that things can "go really bananas" with machines. It is proof why the growing element of automated securities trading is probably a bad thing.

According to the Exchange spokesperson Carl Norell, the mistake was caused by a parsing error in the exchange system. The index derivatives market is still closed as troubleshooting has begun, according to Norell.

It would appear that the future is broken and will not be available until they turn it off and turn it on again. It was ever thus.

http://news.techeye.net/business/swe...e-goes-bananas