Punishing A Stupid Robot

• Posted by DynamicHedge
• on September 30th, 2010

Sven-Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby are two Norwegian traders that exploited a market-making bot on the Oslo Stock Exchange.  The bot was trading for Timber-Hill (IBKR) and was operating in manner that made it easy for the traders to exploit for short-term profit on both the long and short side.  It appears that Timber-Hill allowed this bot to continue trading for two years without making any changes to the algo.  Sven-Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby rightly punished the bot for being programmed so poorly and exploited it daily.  The Oslo Exchange, who is in a strategic alliance with the London Stock Exchange, is bringing the charges against the traders.   If found guilty, these traders would fall victim to the most tragi-comic ruling in recent memory.  Moral of the story, it’s okay to manipulate people but not robots (owned by exchange members).  There’s clearly more to the story and it will be interesting to watch it unfold.

Read the whole fascinating story in these links:

In Defence Of A Robot (Econotwist’s Blog)

Roboten er stokk dum (In Norwegian, use Google translate)

Side note: Sven-Egil Larsen looks a lot like Ricky Gervais:

Separated at birth?

Source: Econotwist’s Blog

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