I’m entering trades last night, about 10 possible trades, Copper the only long.
Icalculated the entries and the stops.I submitted them with my little order-entry tool, a bit of Java code that works around the IB regular hours weakness on NYMEX and ECBOT.
I get up this morning and see that the copper order fired and stopped out. Loss of $30.”Okay, that’s just wrong, IB screwed something up”, I think.It’s happened, if rarely, that a stop fired incorrectly.Okay, actually, it’s only happened once. Anyway.I check the audit trail.The entry and the exit happened the same second. What had I done?Was it the entry tool?
No software error.The error was in the brainware. I had calculated the stop for Copper as if it were a short, not a long.So as soon as it entered, the stop-exit fired, because I was below it.
That was dumb.