April 2020 negative oil price trading-system failures
US crude oil futures traded below zero for the first time in history, and several retail trading platforms (notably Interactive Brokers) mishandled the event, causing some traders unexpected losses far beyond their account balances.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
US crude oil futures traded below zero for the first time in history, and several retail trading platforms (notably Interactive Brokers) mishandled the event, causing some traders unexpected losses far beyond their account balances.
What the software actually got wrong
Some brokerage trading systems had not been built or tested to handle negative prices for a commodity future, so their software miscalculated margin requirements and account values during the brief negative-price window, in some cases forcing erroneous liquidations or blocking clients from managing their positions properly.
Some brokerage trading systems had not been built or...
Some brokerage trading systems had not been built or tested to handle negative prices for a commodity future, so their software miscalculated margin requirements and account values during the brief negative-price window, in some cases forcing erroneous liquidations or blocking clients from managing their positions properly.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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