Exactly right Matty. I am pasting here what I wrote on the SFIO board about my thoughts on the Knight Capital "snafu". The italicized remarks are quotes from a Reuters article about the NITE fiasco. Sorry for the length but sometimes you just need to rant, dont ya know ?!
What a comical and hilarious joke mixed in with a crony firm getting a bit of their own medicine, poetic justice. Not so sure the errant algorithms excuse for 45 minutes causing $440 Million in losses is going to fool the financial community though, I guess we will have to see if that sticks for the long run. Chances are they had to finally take major losses to cover all of their own errant behavior from the criminal manipulation of so many stocks over time and to save face they may be using this "software glitch" story as an excuse. Hey who knows, perhaps Karma does exist after all?!
"Knight said it is "actively pursuing its strategic and financing alternatives"
Sure, whatever, their reputation is toast, good luck trying to get another crony firm to bail them out. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, hmmmm, perhaps its time to take a closer look at the books????????! 
"Knight is among the firms that are critical to smooth, orderly trading.
Market makers match orders from buyers and sellers and often provide liquidity by stepping into the market themselves"
Sure, ok, whatever, thats what we call it, ehhh? They are always "providing liquidity", right? LOL Actually its called massive illegal and systemic naked short selling causing irreversible FTDs for which the DTC must step in and save them constantly by globally locking certain stocks they attack to squeeze out every red cent they can in an attempt to patch up their losses in other trades. Yep, the trading is so "smooth" the typical retail trader hits the buy button and a millisecond later the order has been "matched" and NITE has a little phantom entry in their books and that electronic marker sits there as is for years.
"This is like a nuclear reactor.." Right, that is about to melt down.
"Advocates of trading systems that can pump thousands of shares across Wall Street in milliseconds say the fault lies not in the systems but in the lack of controls at individual firms..."
Hmmmm, for once an accurate and sound statement! If one can call systemic abuse of market maker exceptions of certain SEC rules a "lack of controls at individual firms". Such abuse seems to be rather easy to exploit in this broken system we call the stock market. Simply open up a trading firm, naked short target stocks into oblivion and never deliver shares and aggregate all the 100% profits from the proceeds from illicit stock trades and leverage the capital on margin and use all that phony money to execute billions in trading each day with HFT algorithms in and out of the market in an attempt to game retail traders. Funnel all the profits into a Cayman Island account and repeat this process for years until all the steaming pile of bogus FTDs and SEC issues stink up the whole mess and then once all the money is offshore, create some bogus story of an errant algorithm losing the company tons of money and leave the company with no way out except a bankruptcy. Close down the business legally and then go move to a tropic island with all the billions in offshore accounts. Easy as 1,2,3!
Good riddance, you will not be missed, buh bye NITE. Nitey NITE
