If you have an investment account with ETrade and some shares of SPY ETF in your portfolio, chances are the account total is much higher than it should be. After signing in this morning to check my balance, I saw some bogus numbers and thought I had been hacked. After calling ETrade’s customer service number, an automated voice message confirmed there has been a recent dividend payout bug. What could cause something like this to happen?
Update: as of 10:45am CST, the issues seems to have been resolved
Its really hard to express the business logic of financial institutions. Doesn't matter the language or tooling. Its just really hard.
Ultimately these bugs can all be resolved with little to no damage.
Oh and nobody really shares their implementations, partly because they are so internal facing you can't really abstract it out, but also because its a competitive advantage.
Yup and also even if your code is right you are dependent on external parties (the marketdata provider and the exchange in this case) to do things correctly and often their code will have bugs or their people will make random fatfinger errors etc.
Update: as of 10:45am CST, the issues seems to have been resolved