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Oops, Again: Bargain Basement Edition

You know those technical issues that the stock exchanges were having a little while back? They're still here.
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You know those technicalissues that the stock exchanges were having a little while back? They're still here.

Some premarket transactions in nine big-name stocks were canceled Thursday morning, in the latest example of the trading glitches that have plagued markets this year…

The bad trades came from a securities firm that was sending transactions based on faulty data, said people familiar with the problems. It wasn't clear where the bad data originated.

Just a little glitch, right? Not exactly.

For example, in the seconds before 9:30, several bursts of Citigroup trades pulled the stock's price down from about $36 to as low as $20.10, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of FactSet data. Most of the 49 Citigroup transactions that were later canceled were 100-share orders at $29.99.

The same period saw 101 canceled trades in Hewlett-Packard's stock, which briefly jerked the price from $14.55 to as low as $3.06. In all, the exchange canceled 402 trades involving 141,629 shares, according to data provider Nanex.

The bad numbers hit only the Nasdaq. The Big Board, BATS and Direct Edge said they weren't affected. Almost enough to make on pine for the buttonwood tree. But not quite.

Nasdaq Cancels Trades Over a Firm's Bad Data [WSJ]
Nasdaq Cancels Some Trades in Goldman, Sprint After Error [Bloomberg]
Nasdaq reschedules botched WhiteHorse IPO [Reuters]

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