ASX Out of Order

[Sharkman]

yep combos still not working for me. i was looking to roll my (ITM) covered calls up & out, but in my case it's no biggie, the strike's at my entry price so i'll probably just let it get called away, get back to flat, and move on.

 

[cutz]

Latest I heard is that combinations could be out for another couple of weeks, anyone got any more info ?

I reckon I got lucky this week with the underlying's moving in my favor during legging on several occasion but don't want to push it any longer , these things can get ugly real quick !

 

[cutz]

Ha ha , today is the day I finally became unstuck, now extremely long vol / short delta on WPL attempting to roll a bull
put, bought the next long , keeping the front long, bought back the front short, order in for the next short, it's not going to get hit !!

Joys of joys !!

Sorry @wayneL , long vol is my now new catchphrase ...

Just discovered Chris Cole is on spotify..

 

[cutz]

The TMC outage is an absolute farce !!!

 

[Sharkman]

i normally don't do a whole lot of multilegged spreads to begin with, and i'm definitely not going to do them now, with the exchange having all sorts of problems handling combos. back to purely covered calls and OTM cash covered puts for me, until they sort their $#!@ out.

 

[cutz]

i normally don't do a whole lot of multilegged spreads to begin with, and i'm definitely not going to do them now, with the exchange having all sorts of problems handling combos. back to purely covered calls and OTM cash covered puts for me, until they sort their $#!@ out.

I do those orders all the time, actually up till around 2 weeks ago, now I'm just floundering around legging like a gambler.

TMC's are an important function within the Options Markets, without them us retails are screwed, just like back in the 80's ( before my time but I've read about it ) .

Not certain but I suspect the big swinging ..... are still being serviced by the markets makers.

 

[Sharkman]

article on this today

'Unbelievable state of affairs': Options traders burnt by ongoing ASX outage

Traders are still in the dark about when the ASX's key options trading service will resume, as the prolonged outage puts millions of dollars of investment at risk.

www.smh.com.au

apparently it still works for 100+ contract orders, but there's no way i'm going to be doing 100 contract trades on the likes of CBA or RIO. i have done in the past on some of the lower priced underlyings, but i just don't trust them not to mess it up now, and a 100 contract size trade isn't the sort of thing to be risking on an experiment (for me anyway). i'll probably wait til it's resolved then try a smaller combo first just to somewhat reassure myself that it's working properly.

 

[adamchubb]

any update on TMC?? will TMC be available again?

 

[Sharkman]

it's still down, i just tried to roll a position, it wouldn't accept the order.

the article i mentioned above is incorrect - this was a 100 contract position and the exchange still won't accept it despite what the article says. perhaps they meant 10,000+ contracts, not 100?

i'm just going to take the assignment, i'd planned the trade around that possibility anyway, i just tried to roll the position "for science" to see if combos are working again, but no, still down. terrible service from the ASX.

 

[InsvestoBoy]

Agreed, terrible service.

But if this was not part of your risk model, then you are doing it wrong.

 

[Sharkman]

nah i'm good, i was prepared to take the assignment at the end of today anyway if it comes to that. i was only attempting to roll this for science, to verify if what the article i posted above says (that it still works for 100+ contract trades) was correct or not. turns out, it's not.

 

[qldfrog]

A non expert comment:
Are you telling me that weeks after the failed uodate, they have not managed to be back ?
It is incompetence of the highest level, either from the tech so called fixing it, or if they are stuck in a technical no end from their management.
This should be front page of newspapers, after all this is a private company milking a quasi monopoly government imposed position...not that we can go to the competition really...

 

[Sharkman]

all i know is i got the same "invalid order" message from IB when trying to submit a combo order this morning. i guess there is a minuscule chance that the problem is at IB's end, but since IB system issues are extremely rare (i cannot even remember the last time there was a technical issue at IB's end), it's almost 100% that the ASX is the one who's having issues.

pure speculation on my part, but i'd guess a major factor in these sorts of incidents (and that includes banking outages that seem to happen more and more often these days) is the practice of offshoring critical pieces of technical projects instead of having them built in Australia by Australian professionals. you get what you pay for in the end.

 

[qldfrog]

practice of offshoring critical pieces of technical projects instead of having them built in Australia by Australian professionals. you get what you pay for in the end.

Can not agree more as i was in IT myself and saw first hand the results

 

[Sharkman]

Can not agree more as i was in IT myself and saw first hand the results

yep so am i, and in my time i've seen elementary mistakes constantly made by offshore software dev centres, and i mean really elementary mistakes - stuff like not checking the bounds of an array before attempting to access a specific ordinal, not checking for null pointers before attempting to invoke object members, completely empty exception handlers, the list goes on. the sort of stuff that if not done correctly can, and will, cause very messy crashes, or, even worse in the case of the latter, the "silent but deadly" malfunction.

it doesn't even make sense from a cost perspective, because when (and with these sorts of things it's usually a matter of when, not if) those crashes happen, they then have to pay big bucks to someone who knows what they're doing to find the problem and fix it. if they have to bring in external consultants to do it because they let go all of their internal specialists, then it's even worse as the consultants need to spend time familiarising themselves with the systems before they actually touch anything. possibly that's what's going on here with this ASX debacle. management never seem to learn though, they keep offshoring more and more as time goes on.

 

[Sharkman]

hey combos are working again. didn't notice any sort of announcements (no IB alerts nor anything in the news that i could see), but i just managed to roll a 20 contract size position using one. of course still have to wait and see whether it settles correctly as i have very little faith in their ability to get things working right these days, but IB accepted the order and after a bit of jiggling around with the spread it got filled. but maybe some semblance of normality has returned to the Aust options trading world after all.