Headaches Continue For NASDAQ

At 11:45 am EST this morning, the NASDAQ reported that they had encountered "momentary interruptions" in quote dissemination. The problem seemed to be fixed, as the update also stated that "all channels are now operating normally."

Less than 30 minutes later, the NASDAQ said that the NASDAQ, NASDAQ BX and NASDAQ PSX were all experiencing issues. Five minutes later, the NASDAQ halted trading in all Tape C securities.

Following that, the Nasdaq options markets (PHLX, NOM and BX) were all halted as well.

The NASDAQ would remain out of operation for the next 3+ hours, eventually coming back online with about 30 minutes remaining in the trading day. The quotations being sent out by the exchange remained glitchy, as I witnessed numerous cases where the bid was higher than the ask.

Many market participants were obviously furious with the downtime, and the NASDAQ was left scrambling to try and patch things up as soon as possible.

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The NASDAQ hasn't yet revealed what the problem was, only that there was a "technical issue".

This issue comes just days after a programming error at Goldman Sachs caused the market to be flooded with erroneous stock option orders.

In short - it hasn't been a good week for the electronic trading world.

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Shares of Nasdaq, which have been on an uptrend since their embarrassing Facebook IPO fiasco last year, closed the day down 3.42%.

Filed under: General Market News