Trade cancellation (busted trade)
A busted trade is an execution the exchange cancels after the fact, usually because it happened at a price far outside the market through error. CME's rule on trade cancellations and price adjustments (Rule 588) defines a non-reviewable range around the market in which trades stand; trades outside it can be cancelled or have their price adjusted.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
Definition
Every exchange accepts that errors happen: a price typed with an extra digit, a runaway algorithm, a stop cascade into an empty book. CME Group's trade cancellation and price adjustment rule gives the exchange authority to review such trades. Trades inside the product's non-reviewable range around a fair value stand; trades outside it can be cancelled or adjusted to a price at the edge of that range.
Worked example
Hypothetical: the market trades around 5,000.00 and the non-reviewable range is 6.00 points. A mistaken buy prints at 5,030.00, 30.00 points above fair value. Since 30.00 is more than 6.00, the trade is reviewable and may be cancelled, or its price adjusted to the range limit of 5,006.00. For a 10-lot at $50 per point, the difference between the two prices is 24.00 × 50 × 10 = $12,000 for each side.
How a bust reaches the data
- The original print is published in real time like any other trade.
- The cancellation follows later as a separate message in the exchange's feed.
- Vendors differ in whether and how they pass the correction on.
- Historical datasets built after the fact may already exclude the busted trade.
Why it matters for order flow analysis
A single erroneous print can create a false high or low, a spike of delta, a misleading point of control on a thin session, or a stop trigger on a platform that simulates stops. When a live-recorded session and a vendor's cleaned history disagree on an extreme, a busted trade is one of the explanations to check.
In Senzoukria
The live aggregation builds bars from trades as they are received and has no step that later withdraws a print the exchange cancelled. A busted trade that reached the chart therefore remains in the bars recorded from the live feed, while a history imported later from a provider may not contain it. A cancelled trade is therefore different from a data gap: the print existed, was drawn, and was annulled afterwards.
Common mistakes
- Anchoring a level on an obviously erroneous spike.
- Assuming a fill at a wild price is final before the exchange's review.
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Frequently asked questions
- Can my own fill be busted?
- Yes, if it occurred outside the non-reviewable range and the exchange cancels or adjusts the trade. Your broker then reflects the cancellation or the adjusted price on your account.
- Why does my chart show a high that another platform does not?
- Possibly a trade that was later cancelled: one record kept the original print, the other was built from corrected data. Other causes include different sessions, different contracts or missing data.