Pricing Problem Suspends Nasdaq for Three Hours.

[elleng]

The United States stock market showed again on Thursday that it remained vulnerable to technological breakdowns even as regulators and market operators work to keep up with trading that is increasingly electronic and driven by speed.

The latest trouble shut down trading on the Nasdaq market and its more than 3,000 stocks — including some of the most popular among investors, like Apple and Google — for more than three hours Thursday afternoon.

The disruption on the nation’s second-largest stock market, after the New York Stock Exchange, reverberated up and down Wall Street, affecting other markets as investors cautiously stepped back. Brokers scrambling to trade elsewhere discovered that they could not complete trades while in the dark about prices on Nasdaq. . .

“You have a very Rube Goldberg system,” said Gene Noser, co-founder of the brokerage firm Abel/Noser. “We’ve just put patches on it without attacking the basic problems.”

The persistence of technical flaws — each seemingly coming from a different part of the system — has been blamed on the complexity of the trading technology and the fragmentation of the market itself. In contrast to the days when the New York Stock Exchange competed only with the Nasdaq, today there are 13 public exchanges competing in a fast-changing and low-margin business.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/nasdaq-market-halts-trading/?hp

[Demeter]

1. You know, they always blame the technology

when what ought to get the blame is the people setting up these complex con games. Because that's what it is...an attempt to gut and quarter some group of the economy that didn't quite come off. Until they figure out how to work the con through the system...