Imagine that you own a few hundred shares of Amazon. When you checked the price at market open today it was $972.70 per share. You would have been quite happy. Imagine your shock when you checked your portfolio just a few hours later to find out that the same Amazon share was now listed at $123.47. That represents an 87.24 percent decline or a $844.53 negative move. You would have then immediately checked the news and would have taken a deep breath when you found out that no, Amazon isn’t crumbling, it’s just a data glitch.
The stock market data glitch set the price of several companies on the Nasdaq exchange to $123.47 today. Nasdaq later issued a statement to the Financial Times that this error was caused due to “improper use of test data.”
It was quickly corrected but for a brief period of time, the share prices of some major technology companies like Google and Amazon were fixed at $123.47. Had this been accurate, it would have been an 86.41 percent decline in Google’s stock price which isn’t a move you’d expect from one of the biggest and most profitable tech companies on the planet.
Since this was just a data glitch that just priced these stocks at $123.47 on financial websites like Bloomberg, Google Finance, and Yahoo Finance, it’s not like the trading system was affected. The shares were accurately priced on trading terminals so no one actually lost any money and nor did a lucky few got to buy shares worth close to $1000 for just under $124.
Filed in .. Source: twitter