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  1. Business
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3 August 2012

The Dark Knight Capital Rises

Knight Capital lost $10m a minute. Bane could learn a thing or two.

By Alex Hern

Spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises follow.

While the obvious cinematic comparison with an automatic trading system going rogue for inexplicable reasons and losing its owners $440m in just 45 minute may be the Skynet system of the Terminator series, we can’t help but be a little reminded of a key scene in the apex of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

Bane, the goatse-mouthed villain who sounds like an evil Father Christmas, breaks into the Gotham Stock Exchange, kills some guy, and then proceeds to use all manner of mild technowizardry to make huge amounts of bad trades under Bruce Wayne’s name, bankrupting him and forcing him to relinquish his place on the board of Wayne industries.

Now, even in the film as it stands, it’s not entirely clear why actually does that, as his next action involving the board is to storm in and force them to hand over a fusion reactor at gunpoint, something which he could have done with Wayne present. Nor is it really explained why Gotham Stock Exchange didn’t just roll back any transactions made in the period when a gun-toting madman was holding the exchange hostage and executing obviously illegitimate trades, as the New York Stock Exchange did after Knight Capital’s algos went a bit crazy on Wednesday. 

But really, we now know that Bane didn’t have to do anything at gunpoint at all. If he had just got hold of Wayne’s computer-aided trading wing – and come on, Bruce built a computer which could spy on an entire city using intercepted mobile phone transmissions, don’t try to tell us that he didn’t do computer-aided trading – he could have lost him almost $200,000 a second in untraceable, unrollbackable, instant transactions which would have left his corporate reputation in tatters. Silly Bane.

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Knight Capital itself certainly isn’t doing much better than Wayne Enterprises. That $440m it’s lost, from selling all the stocks it accidentally bought during its computer glitch, easily surpasses the company’s entire quarterly revenue for last quarter. Its own shares were down 75 per cent on their Wednesday morning peak, and are likely to fall further today. It has made itself the target of hostile takeover rumors, and probably irretrievably damaged its reputation for being a safe pair of hands. For a company which once handled 11 per cent of all American stocks, it’s an ignominious fall from grace.

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