A data glitch reset stock prices of top tech companies including Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Tuesday morning saw the stock prices of these top companies to be $123.47 on Bloomberg, Reuters and Google Finance data. The problem lay behind routine test data sent out by US exchanges including Nasdaq (NASDAQ:NDAQ), which was taken to be live figures.
“It was no error by Nasdaq. Some vendors took test data and put it out as live prices.” said an exchange operator.
In result of the new stock prices, Microsoft shares jumped 79.1 percent whilst shares in Apple plummeted by 14.3 percent.
A spokesperson for Nasdaq said: “Nasdaq is investigating the improper use of test data distributed by the UTP [unlisted trading privileges] and consumed by third parties,”
“As part of its normal process, the UTP distributed test data and certain third parties improperly propagated the data. Nasdaq is working with third-party vendors to resolve the matter.”
Google said on the matter: “We can confirm that our third-party finance data partner was providing some inaccurate information, which they received from Nasdaq. This is currently being fixed and we hope to update our stock price data shortly.”
Mohammed Apabhai, head of Asia-Pacific trading strategy at Citigroup said: “We’re more aware these days of the potential for glitches. If something falls by 10 percent, you would probably worry more than if it’s 85 percent,”
“A fall of 10 per cent would signal that people are reassessing value whereas an 85 per cent fall in New York looks like something else is up,” he said.
According to Nasdaq, the mix up did not affect any market trading. However, traders in Hong Kong witnessed a rush of calls from clients and a handful of new trades, which have since been cancelled.
Exchanges have been subject to several glitches over the past few years, some very brief but others more worrying.