Nanex Research
Nanex ~ 20-Feb-2013 ~ Crude Oil Halt
On February 20, 2013 at 11:01:36, the April 2013 crude oil futures contract was hit with over 2500 contracts within 2 seconds sending prices sharply lower. Oddly enough,
12 seconds later, all CME oil futures contracts halted for 10 seconds. Because the circuit
breaker tripped after the market had somewhat stabilized, we think another large sale
appeared that would have decimated prices - which CME's circuit breaker logic picked
up on, causing the halt. This large ghost sale must have been canceled before the 10
second halt ended. Another explanation is a software bug in CME's circuit breaker code,
which we doubt because they have had great success with their circuit breaker logic. Finally, this could just be from an overload at the exchange, though the exact 10 second gap is troubling.
Update: CME is saying there was no circuit breaker tripped. Which means we now have
a mystery on our hands. Here's what we do know:
- The outage was almost exactly 10 seconds.
- There are no quotes or trades in CL futures with timestamps between 11:01:47 and
11:01:58 (EST).
- There is no gap in trade sequence numbers between the start and ending of the outage.
- There wasn't a surge of data after trading/quoting resumed.
1. CL.J13 Futures depth of book and volume.
Nanex Research
Inquiries: pr@nanex.net