This isn't much of an issue for traders That's a nice benefit of having 40+ trading venues in the US. They had problems at the open as well with connectivity on one of their gateways.
Issues like this crop up all the time and most of the time they are resolved before the open.
The good news is that they aren't reporting any lost trades or trade busts yet so this isn't as bad as the BATS open at BATS:)
Having said that, they've announced that they will cancel all open orders, that is a huge deal, I can't remember the last time they did that.
To put that into perspective, cancelling all open orders would be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Ebay loosing all bids on their current auctions.
NYSE has always been considered second rate in their IT compared to the NASDAQ and BATS and this won't do much for their reputation.
EDIT meant BATS not FB, thanks!
One other point to keep in mind when throwing around hacking conspiracies. The exchanges aren't running on public networks. You can't DDOS them or hack directly into the matching engines. Though I'm sure you can break in via some other NYSE owned network and make your way to the matching engine somehow.
To hook into the exchange you either go through a blessed intermediary like GS or you plug directly in via colocation. You just can't keep pinging the NYSE on port 80 to bring it down.
Actually, the FB IPO open fiasco was on Nasdaq not BATS. Nasdaq, has had way more serious issues in the last 2 or 3 years that I can recall compared to NYSE.
[EDIT] The BATS issue you may have been referring to is BATS IPO when they tried to list on their own exchange. The technology failed miserably that day, so much so that they decided to pull the IPO altogether. One of the biggest fails I can think of.
I'm really happy to see that they're canceling all open orders. It's much better than letting them stick around and then execute with unexpected behavior. It looks like NYSE learned from what happened related the FB opening (just as you alluded to), and what happened with Knight around the same time. Playing it safe can be a smart move, even in the stock market.
My immediate reaction is that their system shouldn't require canceling all open orders. But I admit that I don't know much about matching engines.
If they roll out a new version of the module that creates orders, I would think it makes sense to include the version of this order module in the order data structure. This way they can delete only the bad orders, created by the faulty module version, instead of all open orders. But it's also possible that I'm way in over my head here :).
Yes in the sense that about 90% of hedge funds just use a SOR(Smart Order Router) from their executing broker. So from the funds perspective they are just sending an order to GS that should execute on the "US Market" and they expect GS to send it to the appropriate venue.
Most funds just trade through an intermediary like GS and all intermediaries have SOR's that route to each venue in the US as per RegNMS
The remaining 10% are your market makers and HFT's and for them this is a bit of a headache but it happens and they are well equipped to deal with this. No fund that I know of is a market maker for just the NYSE, but if there is then I guess they just go home early?
right. one trading head just noted that it's a "non-issue." the timing is interesting, though. it's midday so there's lighter volume. big problem is going to be with index calculation. other exchanges are functioning just fine and other venues are seeing plenty of action and stability.
I get the impression they'd heard on the wire that something might go down.
Given the blame coming out of China, it wouldn't surprise me if they tried to crash the market on opening with a flurry of sells. Looks like NYSE got a whiff of the pending trades and the NSA stepped in. All trades dropped. Crisis averted. For now...
It should be noted that this concerns only the regular NYSE and NYSE MKT (formerly known as AMEX). Their ECN NYSE Arca is working properly. So, this is really not that big of a deal for the market.
Issues like this crop up all the time and most of the time they are resolved before the open. The good news is that they aren't reporting any lost trades or trade busts yet so this isn't as bad as the BATS open at BATS:)
Having said that, they've announced that they will cancel all open orders, that is a huge deal, I can't remember the last time they did that.
To put that into perspective, cancelling all open orders would be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Ebay loosing all bids on their current auctions.
NYSE has always been considered second rate in their IT compared to the NASDAQ and BATS and this won't do much for their reputation.
EDIT meant BATS not FB, thanks!
One other point to keep in mind when throwing around hacking conspiracies. The exchanges aren't running on public networks. You can't DDOS them or hack directly into the matching engines. Though I'm sure you can break in via some other NYSE owned network and make your way to the matching engine somehow.
To hook into the exchange you either go through a blessed intermediary like GS or you plug directly in via colocation. You just can't keep pinging the NYSE on port 80 to bring it down.