Exchange Follies: Consolidated Tape Edition

Just weeks after telling Congress that doing their jobs has become too damned hard, the stock exchanges are providing more evidence. This time, the problem is the consolidated tape, which provides trade data. Seems it went out for about an hour at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, making it tough to see in anyone had traded in 165 unimportant securities like State Street Corp. stock. And NYSE's snafu follows a consolidated tape screw-up at Nasdaq last week; while NYSE's server error only messed with some of its stocks, Nasdaq's consolidated tape feed went totally blank on Thursday.
Author:
Publish date:

Just weeks after telling Congress that doing their jobs has become too damned hard, the stock exchanges are providing more evidence.

This time, the problem is the consolidated tape, which provides trade data. Seems it went out for about an hour at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, making it tough to see in anyone had traded in 165 unimportant securities like State Street Corp. stock. And NYSE's snafu follows a consolidated tape screw-up at Nasdaq last week; while NYSE's server error only messed with some of its stocks, Nasdaq's consolidated tape feed went totally blank on Thursday.

The episode was the latest disruption of reporting to the so-called consolidated tape, the record of securities transactions across all U.S. exchanges. Financial firms, news agencies and regulators rely on the consolidated tape to track market activity, though exchanges also sell direct data feeds that provide more detailed information. A similar outage also affected Nasdaq-listed stocks last week.

Starting at 2:10 p.m. EST on Tuesday, the NYSE began “experiencing an issue publishing trade and quote information” in stocks with symbols ranging from SJ to TCZ, it said in a notice to customers.

For these keeping track, in recent months our bourses have had to admit they can't competently run IPOs, deal with faulty data, print water-proof stock certificates and now, reliably provide trade data. But they are available for a bargain.

NYSE Server Failure Interrupts Market Data on 165 Securities [WSJ MarketBeat blog]
Traders Report Technical Issue Involving Nasdaq-Listed Securities [WSJ]

Related

News

Running Exchanges Is Too Hard, Exchange Chiefs Say

U.S. exchanges have become a handful to handle. It seems that all of the order types they've instituted over the years to keep customers and regulators happy may have had the opposite result. But it's not Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or some other Capitol Hill communist levying these charges. It's the exchanges themselves. And rather than doing something about the things they've done to make themselves "overly complex and opaque" at the expense of ordinary investors, they'd prefer to have Congress make them do something.

News

Exchanges Look to Impose Uniform Speed-Bumps

Executives from the nation’s various trading venues convened are holding meetings in Washington today to devise new rules that aim to prevent the dramatic 1,000-point drop in the Dow that shocked the markets last week.

News

So Things Hit A Rough Patch And Facebook Is Ready To Throw In The Towel?

Is that how it is? NYSE Euronext and Facebook have exchanged phone calls and e-mails about the possibility of the company switching its listing from Nasdaq OMX Group, according to a person familiar with the matter. Facebook, which listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market on May 18 after completing the world’s biggest initial public offering by a technology company, is listening to the New York Stock Exchange, said the person, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Facebook Said To Have Talked With NYSE About Exchange Switch [Bloomberg]