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Fact check

Is it true: Knight Capital Group $440M algorithmic trading loss (Aug 1 2012)?

Confirmed5% confidence

Yes — this is confirmed.

The $440M loss and its technical cause are fully confirmed by SEC investigation, Knight Capital's own post-mortem, and regulatory proceedings. The mechanism — an undeployed server running deactivated 2003-era Power Peg code — is documented in granular detail. Conspiracy claims of deliberate manipulation have no evidentiary basis. SEC fined Knight $12M in 2013; Reg SCI followed in 2014.

The claim

On 1 August 2012, Knight Capital Group lost approximately $440 million in 45 minutes due to an algorithmic trading misconfiguration during the NYSE's Retail Liquidity Program launch. New SMARS routing

Key evidence

No second engineer was required to review the code deployment that caused the crash

SEC confirmed the technical mechanism: incomplete SMARS deployment

Read the full evidence file

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