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Crashing exchanges
交易所崩溃
Code blue
蓝色警报
A new type of market crash proliferates
新一类的市场崩溃频发
Aug 31st 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition
TIME was it took a war to close a financial exchange. Now all it needs is a glitch in technology. On August 26th trading on Eurex, the main German derivatives exchange, opened as usual; 20 minutes later it shut down for about an hour. Four days earlier the shares of every company listed on NASDAQ, an American stock exchange, ceased trading for three hours. The direct impact of these computer crashes was small. But, given that global markets and financial firms are all hooked up through complex trading programs, the indirect impact could be significant.
曾几何时，发生战争时金融交易才会中止；但现在，技术上的一点故障就能导致相同的结果。8月26日，德国衍生品交易的主要场所——欧洲期货交易所，照常开市；但在20分钟后却临时关停1个小时。四天前，在美国股票交易所——纳斯达克上市的公司股票全部暂停交易两小时。这些计算机故障导致的直接影响很小，但考虑到全球市场和金融公司都通过复杂的交易程序联系在一起，间接的影响简直不可估量。
In these two cases there was no news of big losses. So there was no panic. All concerned also appear to be making a genuine effort to understand and disclose what went wrong. NASDAQ’s reputation and revenues are still suffering from the disastrous public offering of Facebook in May of 2012, when computer glitches produced an estimated $500m-worth of errant trades. Knight Capital, a securities firm, never recovered from a $460m trading glitch last year. On August 20th a flurry of misdirected trades by Goldman Sachs, a bank, caused embarrassment and as yet unspecified losses. Even the most robust seem vulnerable.
在两次关停事件中，都未出现重大损失的报道，因而也没有恐慌。所有关心此事的人都发挥着自己的聪明才智理解、揭示出错的原因。2012年5月脸书的灾难性公开发行对纳斯达克的名誉和交易额影响尚未褪去，彼时计算机的小错误引发了一笔价值近5亿美元错误交易。证券公司——游侠资本也尚未从去年价值4.6亿美元的错误中恢复过来。在8月20日，高盛银行的误操作同样导致一系列错误交易并引发恐慌，相关损失的数额时至今日依然未能确定。即使最为稳健的公司也如此不堪一击。
But the frequency of such failures may actually make them less disturbing. Amazon and Google, generally reckoned to be capable and resilient operators on the web, each had blackouts in recent weeks. Systems were reset, business resumed, small losses were absorbed. Zero tolerance of failure, which applies to airlines, bridges and tunnels is not so vital for electronic operators and financial firms.
但这类错误出现的如此频繁也可能导致人们对其的不安程度降低。亚马逊和谷歌，两家被认为有能力有余地的互联网运营商都在近几周出现了业务突然中断。系统很快被重设，业务恢复，重大程度较小的损失被化解。空乘、路桥和隧道领域应用的失误零容忍原则对于电子操作和财务公司来说反而不是那么重要。
Especially if the problems are laid bare and addressed. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ordered a post-mortem from the New York Stock Exchange’s Arca division, which electronically trades non-NYSE stocks and where the problems tied to the NASDAQ outage began. And it has asked for an account of what unfolded in a system operated by NASDAQ which consolidates trading at America’s 17 exchanges. The system was overwhelmed while trying to reconnect with Arca, triggering a “code blue” alert (a term used in hospital emergencies) and the cessation of trading.
尤其是，如果问题直接暴露出来而且能够得到解决。证券交易委员会已经要求纽约证券交易所对Arca系统进行事后调查，该系统以电子方式完成纳斯达克以外的股票交易，并与导致纳斯达克交易中止的问题相关。委员会还要求了解由纳斯达克运营、用于整合全美17家交易所的系统下还隐藏了什么。该系统在尝试重连到Arca时发生了宕机，进而导致“蓝色警报”（医院急诊中使用的术语），以及交易的中止。
Oddly, nowhere near as much attention is being applied to Goldman, which has been secretive about what went wrong. It has said only that “immaterial losses” occurred from trading problems during a system upgrade and that a review is under way.
奇怪的是，高盛对错误表现出遮遮掩掩的态度后获得了前所未有的关注。它只表示此次“微不足道的错误”是由系统升级后导致的交易错误引发的，相关调查正在进行中。
It is widely believed that Goldman’s losses stemmed from a “dark pool”—designed to gather and match trading interest unobtrusively—which inadvertently spat out prices onto public exchanges. Reports put the losses anywhere between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
普遍的观点是，高盛的损失来自于“暗池”——设计用于谨慎的获得、匹配交易利益的系统——无意中将价格信息发布到了公开交易市场上。报告认为损失的程度在100亿到1000亿美元之间。
Even before the glitches, the SEC was taking increased interest in potential trading problems and how they might be disclosed. In March it published a proposal known as Regulation SCI (systems compliance and integrity). Exchanges and banks are resisting one of its requirements, which is to report blackouts even if they do not lead to anything as severe as trading halts.
即使在故障之前，证券交易委员会也对潜在存在的交易问题和如何发现它们投以越来越大的兴趣。在三月份，它发布了被称为SCI（系统法规遵从性和完整性）监管条例的提议。证券和银行对其中一条要求持抵制态度——对每次宕机进行报告，即使并未引发类似于交易终止这样严重的后果。
America’s regulators are often accused of being heavy-handed. But forcing more transparency on the black boxes that have replaced screaming humans on Wall Street must be a good thing.
美国的监管者常被指责为手段粗暴。但是华尔街那些尖声喊叫的人被黑箱替换掉后，强迫让这黑箱拥有更多的透明度，一定是件不错的事。
