22 Aug 2013
NASDAQ trading suspended Thursday
FXstreet.com (New York) - The US stock exchange halted all trading of Nasdaq-listed stocks – including major companies like Apple, Microsoft and Intel – because of a technical glitch Thursday afternoon.
Nasdaq cited problems “disseminating” price quotes and said trading would resume at approximately 3:25PM EDT. Trouble appeared to first surface at 11:45AM. Eastern time, when Nasdaq said it was experiencing “momentary interruptions” in distributing quote prices. At 12:14PM., an alert went out to halt trading for “Tape C” securities, which are effectively all of its stocks.
“NASDAQ will not be cancelling open orders on the book,” the company said on its Web site. “Customers who wish to cancel their orders may do so and any customer who wishes to not participate in the re-opening should cancel their orders prior to the resumption of trading.”
Equity trader Sal Arnuk, co-founder of Themis Trading, said Nasdaq ran into trouble with the security information processor, or SIP, which manages the quotes for each stock in real time for all 13 exchanges. “When Nasdaq was not interacting appropriately with the SIP, there are dangers in no one knowing what the best price in the market is, so they halted trading,” he said.
There are several thousand stocks that trade on Nasdaq, from small cap shares to Microsoft and Apple. Because so much of the trading in the market is correlation based there could be far-reaching implications for stock that are traded on other exchanges, Arnuk said.
The world of stock trading has become faster and increasingly complex in recent years. Unexpected snafus have become an almost regular occurrence. In May 2010, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 600 points before jumping back up within minutes — an incident that became known as the “flash crash.”
Nasdaq cited problems “disseminating” price quotes and said trading would resume at approximately 3:25PM EDT. Trouble appeared to first surface at 11:45AM. Eastern time, when Nasdaq said it was experiencing “momentary interruptions” in distributing quote prices. At 12:14PM., an alert went out to halt trading for “Tape C” securities, which are effectively all of its stocks.
“NASDAQ will not be cancelling open orders on the book,” the company said on its Web site. “Customers who wish to cancel their orders may do so and any customer who wishes to not participate in the re-opening should cancel their orders prior to the resumption of trading.”
Equity trader Sal Arnuk, co-founder of Themis Trading, said Nasdaq ran into trouble with the security information processor, or SIP, which manages the quotes for each stock in real time for all 13 exchanges. “When Nasdaq was not interacting appropriately with the SIP, there are dangers in no one knowing what the best price in the market is, so they halted trading,” he said.
There are several thousand stocks that trade on Nasdaq, from small cap shares to Microsoft and Apple. Because so much of the trading in the market is correlation based there could be far-reaching implications for stock that are traded on other exchanges, Arnuk said.
The world of stock trading has become faster and increasingly complex in recent years. Unexpected snafus have become an almost regular occurrence. In May 2010, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 600 points before jumping back up within minutes — an incident that became known as the “flash crash.”