NASDAQ Trading Halted Due To "Technical Issue" 240
barlevg writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that trading was halted midday Thursday due to an as-yet unnamed technical issue. Says SEC spokesperson John Nester, 'We are monitoring the situation and in are close contact with the exchanges.'"
Re:obvious (Score:1, Informative)
NASDAQ uses Linux.
Re:MUAHAHAHAHA (Score:4, Informative)
Think of it this way. It's like Las Vegas. Except it's legal everywhere and there's less oversight to keep people honest. Oh, and if you are dishonest, they just take back a portion of your ill-gotten gains, instead of breaking your legs.
Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad (Score:4, Informative)
You don't make money by "getting in the middle of slower orders" in any risk-free way. Markets don't work that way. You do make money by being the first to trade on "news", but better that than insider trading (i.e., better to trade 1 ms after than 1 week before). You do make money by taking a little risk as a market maker, but HFT has squeezed profits there very thin.
Do you have any idea how tiny $1 B/year is compared to the amount of stock that trades each year? I'm sure profits are much higher, just on first-after-news trading, and that doesn't mean there's a problem.
When I trade (being a little guy who doesn't follow the markets constantly) I get a better price thanks to HFT: the bid-ask gap is tiny these days, often 1 cent, and my broker makes $10 on the same trade the HFT guy makes $0.01 or so.
Re:obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Specifically, NASDAQ runs UTP from NYSE-Euronext.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Trading_Platform [wikipedia.org]
UTP runs on Linux [pdf link].
https://nysetechnologies.nyx.com/sites/technologies.nyx.com/files/L5756_NYSE%20Tech%20UTP_IM_OST_100105b.pdf [nyx.com]
Re:Goldman must have lost money on a trade (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's not mathematically impossible. It is statistically improbable.
Re:MUAHAHAHAHA (Score:5, Informative)
"Class warfare" gets my vote for the most hackneyed and ultimately meaningless term of the century. What exactly is "class warfare"? From it's reflexive overuse, I can only infer that it means that any discussion of economic conflicts of interest between people of different wealth and income levels should be forbidden as crass, petty, uninformed, counter-productive, and most importantly, something that people who use the term "class warfare" don't want to discuss.
"Class warfare" does mean something: It means that poor and middle-class people are complaining and reacting to being shafted by rich people, but the person who's writing wants to make it seem like those complaints or reactions are somehow illegitimate or will lead to Stalinism in America.