Nasdaq Triggers Market-Wide Circuit-Breaker As AMZN "Crashes" 87% After-Hours
by Tyler Durden
Jul 3, 2017 10:25 PM
Nasdaq has issued a
market-wide trading halt amid what appears to be a "glitch" that sent a
number of the largest Nasdaq-listed stocks to crash or spike to exactly $123.47 per share.
This move crashed the value of companies including Amazon and Apple, sparked chaos in Microsoft, while sending
Zynga rocketing up more than 3000%.On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday and in after-hours trading, The FT reports that market data show that companies such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and Zynga were repriced at $123.47.
The Bloomberg data terminal listed either
“market wide circuit breaker halt — level 2” or “volatility trading pause” on all the stocks affected.
The glitch did not affect any market trading, including after hours.
The mysterious reset to $123.47 per share meant that
Amazon in theory saw its share price marked down 87.2 per cent...while
shares in Apple fell 14.3 per cent...But Nasdaq-listed
Microsoft had jumped 79.1 per cent — which would value the company at nearly $1tn...
As Bloomberg reports,
the apparent swings triggered trading halts in some securities, according to automatically generated messages. The halts are a mechanism exchanges use to limit the impact of particularly volatile sessions. A system status alert on Nasdaq’s website said that systems were operating normally at 8:23 p.m. ET. After-market hours on Nasdaq typically last from 4 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
In a statement,
Nasdaq said the glitch was related to “improper use of test data” sent out to third party data providers, and said it was working to “ensure a prompt resolution of this matter”. In cases of any clearly erroneous data, trades made are cancelled.
As a reminder this is not the first time 'glitches' have occurred on holidays...
remember gold on Thanksgiving 2014.