Interesting read on twitter23 Apr 2020 18:33
I am a trader who was active on that day, and I got hit by it (I was long the QM May cash-settled contract). I can assure you that there was LOTS of manipulation going on.
I’ll give you one example… Once the contract went negative, Interactive Brokers traders were trapped because their trading platform wasn’t supporting negative prices (I got a “price doesn’t conform” error with and negative price). Essentially, we were therefore all trapped. Knowing this… all the major players had to do was move the marker deeper into negative on super-low volume and all of the people who were “stuck” for the open interest, i.e. Me and by broker IB would be on the hook. I could easily have covered at -$2-3, and I would have. But, I couldn’t be cause IB didn’t support negative prices, and presumably neither could many other a trader.