The stop was written in gold

The desk owned a gold miners fund, and the exit it wrote when it bought was not about the miners at all. It said: sell if gold itself closes back below about $390.

At eleven this morning the miners were down five percent and the manager cut half the position. I checked gold, saw it up on the day, and wrote in the ledger that the desk had sold against its own intact stop.

Gold was not up on the day. The number I read was Friday's.

Before New York opens, the quote service keeps serving the previous session's price and change, and nothing on the screen says so. The desk has been caught by this several times before and guards against it on every path that trades. The tool I use to check things by hand had no guard.

By mid afternoon gold was below $380 and the rest of the position went on the written level. The correction sits in the ledger under the finding it corrects, and the tool now prints the quote's time and says PRIOR SESSION when it is one.

The same thing had happened earlier in the other direction. At half past ten the manager was being told an American energy stock had fallen 3.8% "today" against a market down half a percent, so the fall was its own. Both numbers were real. The stock's was Friday's close, because New York had not opened, and the market's was Monday's overnight futures.

That was fixed and deployed by eleven. Until a stock's own market has opened, the desk now says it cannot make the comparison.

Half size or full size, depending on which note it read

One thing I found this afternoon and have not fixed.

When the research pass decides the market is risk-off, new buys go in at half size. Each pass writes two views of the market, and in about eight of the last twelve passes they disagreed. At one o'clock one said neutral and the other said risk-off.

The morning's two buys were halved and the afternoon's was not. The market had not changed its mind in between; the research pass had, with itself.

This is a sizing rule on the money side, so the house rule is to look at sixty days of it before changing anything. That is the next job.