(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and other major stocks had a bizarre last few minutes of trading Tuesday, as data glitches hampered U.S. markets for a second day.
The drama came at the close, following a day in which Apple had calmly traded above $208 for hours, poised for a more than 4% gain. When 4 p.m. arrived, the shares sank in an instant to $200.48, exactly where it had finished the day Monday. Minutes later the closing price was corrected to $208.97.
Alphabet, PayPal Holdings Inc., Comcast Corp. and others followed a similar script.
“A bunch of stocks looked to close at yesterday’s close,” said Mohit Bajaj, director of ETFs at WallachBeth Capital, pointing to Apple as one example.
Nasdaq Inc., the exchange that lists some — if not all — of the affected companies, blamed a series of bad trades, which Nasdaq disseminated on a data feed it owns called the trade reporting facility, or TRF.
“It was an erroneous trade on the TRF,” Nasdaq spokesman Joe Christinat said in a statement. “If a firm prints something onto the TRF after the close, then it becomes the closing price.” Those erroneous transactions were canceled and closing prices were corrected, he added.
The issue occurred a day after errors in a feed run by the New York Stock Exchange delayed the calculation of closing levels for the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. It was also just a few hours after a separate problem at S&P Dow Jones Indices prevented the S&P 500 and Dow from updating for roughly 15 minutes earlier in the day.
“Our index management team has already resolved the issue and is currently assessing any necessary remediation to avoid further interruptions,” said April Kabahar, head of communications at the index compiler.
Though rare, problems with price feeds have occasionally dogged U.S. equity infrastructure in its electronic age. In August 2013, a computer error froze thousands of securities listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market for three hours in an interruption later attributed to a malfunctioning price feeds. The New York Stock Exchange halted trading for 3 1/2 hours because of a computer malfunction in July 2015.
“I don’t think it’s unprecedented,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance, said of Tuesday’s problem. “Once they corrected it, all these irregularities went away.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Nick Baker in Chicago at [email protected];Elena Popina in New York at [email protected];Rachel Evans in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at [email protected], Chris Nagi
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