Data Glitch Sets Tech Company Stock Prices At $123.47

For one moment on Monday evening, the prices of several stocks on Nasdaq -- including those of Amazon, Apple, eBay, Google, and Microsoft -- were all priced exactly the same, $123.47. From a report: In a statement obtained by the Financial Times, Nasdaq said the culprit was "improper use of test data" that was picked up by third party financial data providers. The exchange said it was "working with third party vendors to resolve this matter." The issue was replicated across major financial websites, including Bloomberg, Google Finance, and Yahoo Finance, and it's not known when it all started.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the Russians, obviously.

Re: More likely explanation?

[Anonymous Coward]

No because any trades against this price would be cancelled anyway.

Re: More likely explanation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn about T+3 settlement and you'll see why that wouldn't work.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you sell them at the normal price before it's canceled, withdraw as cash, and skidaddle?

No. All trades have to clear. While your account may immediately reflect the transaction, until it clears you can't actually take the money.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

Do the trades "clear" in the same way that checks "clear"? In other words, is there literally no point in time when you can be 100% sure that the transaction won't be reversed on you like with checks?

100% I don't know, but it's got to be high 99s.

Yeah for HFT!

[rsilvergun]

This would be a complete non-issue without it. But I'm guessing tens of millions of dollars of transactions went through in that moment.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[F.Ultra]

No it never happened that way, the problem happened after market close due to retard developers at some of the market data firms. Also the HFT firms would never source data from the system that "caused" this since the latency if far to high. The problem is that one of the aggregation systems from Nasdaq (SIP) sends out test data after market close and since the 3d of July was early close on Nasdaq this meant that the test data was sent earlier than before so devs who only looked at the timestamp instead of

AI Traders

[0100010001010011]

So all of the automatic buy/sell triggers realized this and no one dumped their stocks in a firesale, right?

Re:

[Opportunist]

To sell, you need a buyer. If the stock is usually rolling around the 10 dollars mark, you will not find any idiot buying at 123,47. Likewise if it's at around 500 bucks you won't find anyone selling.

So unless a stock was close to this price, I doubt that any buy/sell orders could be filled.

Re:

[Hentes]

True, but OP was talking about automated algorithms. Wouldn't have been the first time that stop loss orders cascaded into a flash crash.

Re:

[Opportunist]

So a few HFTs get hosed?

I fail to see the problem. Maybe that way they get to feel what they usually do with the rest of the world.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

HFTers never get hosed. They are a privileged elite and any erroneous trades would be rolled back. HFTs are the exchanges bread and butter, they don't want to upset them in any way.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but wrong. Most buy/sell orders are "market orders" and you are charged the going price regardless of whether or not it is unreasonable. Unless you submit a "limit order" to prevent such things from happening, you are stuck.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

Most buy/sell orders are "market orders"

I doubt that's true even during normal hours, but it's certainly not true outside of them. Plus this wasn't even a market problem, but rather an information problem. The market prices were not affected.

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You'll find stop loss orders selling.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

These prices where never distributed on systems where HFT source their data (the latency is to high) and it also happened after market close so there where no where to perform the trades anyway.

Unfortunately

[Big Hairy Ian]

It's easily done if you haven't gone to great pains to isolate your test environment.

Re:

[JustNiz]

Not really. You just dont use any production systems at all.

trial run

[turkeydance]

instead of WannaCry, WannaBuy?

The glitch is obvious...

[__aaclcg7560]

It should have been $123.45. But someone got greedy and added two cents.

Re:The glitch is obvious...

[anegg]

That was the other test engineer - he had to put his $0.02 in.

Re:

[fisted]

It doesn't compile, you cannot use on floating point types.
But it's okay. If you fixed that, it wouldn't link, because wtf is println.
Fine, though, if you fixed that, it would only break conventions because all caps are usually reserved for macros (and, for some reason, FILE).

So overall, the output is likely a ton of diagnostics.

EDIT(*): I realize now it was a joke. Never mind.

(*) Finally! Thank you so much, /.! This must be some sort of record for the longest-wanted feature on a website that was eventually

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or, it was Geordi and he just *had* to fix it to 47.

Salami code

[Comboman]

Maybe the code being tested was a Salami Slicing [wikipedia.org] exploit and the programming had just watched Superman III (but not Office Space).

Re:

[F.Ultra]

No they are not. Stocks priced at 1 USD and above are traded at two decimals an stocks with a price below 1 USD are traded at four decimals.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

Stocks trade in values more significant than a penny. How does the poster or the article not realize this.

Perhaps he is not privy to your personal fantasy world where that's true. How do you not realize this?

Re:

[F.Ultra]

It's actually even worse. The system in question (SIP) is an aggregation system from Nasdaq which aggregates orders and trades into stock quotes for people and companies that don't want to subscribe to the whole data flow just to get a nice stock quote once in a while. Which is why this to begin with only affected web sites and never any trades or HFT firms.

This system usually sends out test data after market close for various reasons. On the 3d of July the Nasdaq had an early close due to the 4th of July h

Missing Parts of the Story

[WindowsStar]

Soooo missing a big part of the story....so if someone bought a lot of Google or Apple stock at $123.47 and the price goes back to what it really was, do they get the keep the stock at the correct price? The person bought in good faith, and provided real money to do so, and we have to have FULL confidence in the way stock is purchased or the whole system collapses. If someone bought stock at the wrong price unknowingly, the people that posted the wrong price need to be responsible for posting the wrong pric

Re:Missing Parts of the Story

[FlyHelicopters]

Wrong prices get posted all the time, companies cancel orders for it every day, it is legal...

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Soooo missing a big part of the story....so if someone bought a lot of Google or Apple stock at $123.47 and the price goes back to what it really was, do they get the keep the stock at the correct price? The person bought in good faith, and provided real money to do so, and we have to have FULL confidence in the way stock is purchased or the whole system collapses. If someone bought stock at the wrong price unknowingly, the people that posted the wrong price need to be responsible for posting the wrong pric

you have your stock at that price with ful tarder

[Joe_Dragon]

you have your stock at that price with full manual trader fees added to the order

I almost lost it for a minute...

[Ramley]

I saw this when I went to Google Finance to check my stocks yesterday after the market close. I own and/or follow several of the affected stocks.

At first I thought "Whaaaat?!?!?" Amazon lost 87% in one day!? Cisco down 14%? Apple way down, Microsoft up 5_ (something) points... so obviously it seemed fishy, but still small panic... So I went to Yahoo finance, same things. Uh oh!

I then began searching for new on the NASDAQ and didn't find anything relevant to a tech shakeup or any stocks that got

Comment

[WallyL]

47 [wikia.com] strikes again!