NASDAQ resumes trading after technical problems
A stock specialist watches prices as he works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 5, 2011. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.2 percent to 11,403.06 in early trading on Friday, in a volatile opening after the release of a better-than-expected US employment report. The broader S&P 500 was down 0.1 percent to 1,199.00, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slumped 0.7 percent to 2,538.53 after 40 minutes of trading. Stocks initially rallied more than one percent, then pared their gains and dipped into the red after the US Labor Department said the country’s economy generated 117,000 jobs in July, cutting the unemployment rate down a notch to 9.1 percent.
Trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market resumed after it came to an abrupt halt for three hours on Thursday due to an unknown technical glitch.
The outage affects all Nasdaq-listed stocks including Apple, Microsoft and Facebook and paralyzed a large portion of the United States stock market.
"I've never seen anything like this in my life," said Dave Rovelli, managing director of US equity trading at Canaccord Genuity. "It's horrible."
"All you should do is watch the Nasdaq stock, the NDAQ. I guarantee they're going to crush the stock. Everything is on lockdown," Rovelli continued. "For a little while you could trade in dark pools, but even my dark-pool vendor shut down."
Nasdaq alerted traders at 12:14 p.m. that it was “halting trading in all stocks.” It also stopped trading in options.
By 1:00 p.m. Nasdaq sent out an update which said trading would reopen "at a time to be determined."
As of 1:20 p.m., the Nasdaq composite index was frozen at 3,631.17 up 31.38 for the day. It is up 20 percent this year so far.
Reports said there were problems with a data feed. This is just the latest outage in a series of high-profile glitches that raised questions about the reliability of the US electronic trading systems.
Shortly before 2:30 p.m. Nasdaq announced that it intended to re-open stock trading at 3:25 p.m.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement: “We are monitoring the situation and are in close contact with the exchanges.”
One trader said "the last time this happened, a squirrel chewed through a wire."
Traders reportedly scrambled to figure out how the outage would affect the market and some were moving trades to other exchanges.
Jonathan Corpina, a stock trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange told the New York Times clients were “looking for answers and explanations because they can’t get through to the Nasdaq on the phone.”