Final Note on Last Week
Hi Everyone,
Sorry about the trading issues that all of you had to deal with last week. Basically, for months we have had stable trading because we upgraded our infrastructure to get data directly from the exchanges. This was working well until Thursday when our servers were overwhelmed with massive and historic trading volume for that day. On Thursday the market volume was 2.5 times the usual volume. This volume was the highest in years and perhaps the highest in the entire history of the market.
Because of massive trading volumes, our server processed trades 2 hours behind schedule. Earlier in the week, we actually saw this coming and ordered new servers on Tuesday to increase our capacity but we couldn’t get the servers up in time to process the trades for Thursday. Luckily, we get the new servers on Thursday night and trades were processed normally on Friday. The site should be back to normal from now on.
Phuc, Co-Founder and CTO

September 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am
Yahoo mail is down and so is my Outlook, so I am trying this to communicate about an exception error. I tried twice to Buy to Cover MI, and got bounced to the exception screen. MI still shows in my portfolio. What’s up?
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:29 am
Help ! Cannot sell, either !
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:42 am
UpDown, what is going on, losing serious cash as we speak, this is just another problem of many that has been screwing traders, thanks
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Yep, problem still exists!
At least this time I’m on the right side for now - but still is awful not to be able to exit!
October 1st, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I was told by Sherri Cheung that, “orders will appear at the price you entered. Your actual portfolio value in our database is correct.” Well, I am still waiting for the correct price to appear.
I sold a portfolio of index-tracking ultra-short ETFs just before the close on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. All were up nicely. The “madness of crowds” leading to a rush into Treasury Bills that day was indication a bottom was near. So, I sold my ETFs at-the-market. However, my sell orders were not executed until 11:00 a.m. the next day.
The disparity in proceeds I received was rather substantial. I had the same trade running in real-time and here are the differences:
ETF UpDown Real-time
MZZ $64.89 $66.47
QID $52.26 $54.22
SDD $70.83 $73.79
SDS $76.13 $78.09
TWM $73.10 $76.87
When you consider each of my UpDown positions was in the thousands of shares, the impact this delay had on my account balance was substantial.
I am still waiting to hear from someone about this issue’s resolution.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Hi Tom,
I can take care of this for you. Please email a list of the incorrect transactions, including the date made, symbol, number of shares, executed price, and correct price, to brendan@updown.com. I can do my best to manually make the changes in our system.
Regards,
Brendan
UpDown Team
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
hey guys, im not sure whats going on, but i have some shares of tma and ive made about 3 to 4 hundred thousand off it in the last few days. for some reason, yesterday it said that my total went from like 1.3 mil to 9 hundred thousand, but i didnt show any losses, but gains for yesterday. Its still showing me as being #174 in the contest however. What happened???