In light of today’s SpaceX IPO, a story from inside Jane Street on the day of the 2012 Facebook IPO:

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For weeks leading up to the May 18, 2012 IPO of Facebook, the entirety of Jane Street’s trading and tech teams had been preparing for a record trading day. Increased volumes, volatility, and dislocations were expected across equities stat arb, domestic ETFs, and index futures.

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Replying to ifiokambrose: "Why did this happen? It turns out that the box’s firmware had hardcoded the assumption that the struct field holding the number of orders on the..."
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That assumption failed for the Facebook IPO. Overflow of a single byte caused Jane Street’s US trading operations to halt, which even then accounted for double-digit percentages of US equity/ETF volume. We ended up using a secondary data provider and narrowly averted catastrophe.

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n trading there’s nothing better than meeting an unprecedented market event head-on and learning from it. SPCX traders, I hope there aren’t 2^24-1 orders at the support today
Source: https://x.com/brettharrison/status/2065435507773902991?s=46

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