History

This account comes from several publicly available sources as well as accounts from insiders who worked at Knight Capital Group at the time of the issue. I am telling it second- or third-hand.

On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital fell on its sword. It experienced a software glitch that literally bankrupted the company. Between 9:30 am and 10:15 am EST, the employees of Knight capital watched in disbelief and scrambled to figure out what went wrong as the company acquired massive long and short positions, largely concentrated in 154 stocks, totaling 397 million shares and $7.65 billion. At 10:15, the kill switch was flipped, stopping the company’s trading operations for the day. By early afternoon, many of Knight Capital’s employees had already sent out resumes, expecting to be unemployed by the end of the week.