Biggest Trading Mistakes!

Patrick Boyle On Finance

A small London based crypto asset trading platform called DeversiFi got quite a shock two weeks ago when it mistakenly paid out a $24m fee to a large crypto miner. Transferring crypto deposits generates a fee, known in the industry as a “gas fee”, to compensate miners for the computing energy used to verify transactions on the blockchain. DeversiFi should have paid out around $5, but instead transferred 23.7 million dollars due to an error in their code.
A few fat finger errors like this in the crypto space have made it into the press in recent months. Compound another DeFi project accidentally handed tokens worth $90m to its users and its owner threatened to report the recipients to the IRS before later backing down. Alchemix - another DeFi protocol forgave 4.8 million dollars of borrowers’ loans prematurely, essentially giving them free money. Once again, almost everyone returned the funds once the error was pointed out.
Most modern trading software has built in controls to prevent huge fat finger mistakes from occurring. This protects both traders and brokerages from the losses that can come from these mistakes. In addition exchanges have rules in place to allow traders to request cancellation of fat finger errors. Most exchanges require you to request a cancellation within thirty minutes of the trades execution.
So, for today’s video let’s look at some of the biggest fat finger mistakes in recent market history and see what lessons we can learn.
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