- Title: USA: Wall Street climbs after extended Nasdaq outage
- Date: 22nd August 2013
- Summary: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 22, 2013) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF EXTERIORS OF NASDAQ
- Embargoed: 6th September 2013 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Usa
- Country: USA
- Topics: Economy
- Reuters ID: LVAA5RVL6QT3VFTHKRKUGTLU9UQK
- Story Text: Stocks closed higher on Thursday (August 22) in a trading session marred by a historic trading halt of roughly three hours on the Nasdaq stock exchange as a result of technical problems.
All traffic through Nasdaq OMX Group Inc (NDAQ.O), the second-largest U.S. stock exchange stopped at 12:14 p.m. (1614GMT), the exchange said on its website. Shares in Nasdaq closed down 3.4 percent to $30.46 (USD).
The exchange resumed trading with a single stock, Atlantic American Corp (AAME.O), at 3:00 p.m. (1900GMT) before trading resumed in all of its listed securities at 3:25 p.m. The lightly traded stock advanced 0.6 percent to $3.82.
Thursday's failure at Nasdaq is the latest of a flurry of high-profile glitches to hit U.S. stock market trading. The incidents, included the "flash crash" in 2010, errors related to the Facebook Inc IPO and Knight Capital's disastrous trading blowup last year.
James Angel, Associate Professor of Finance at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, said Nasdaq responded appropriately to the glitch.
"We live in a technologically very complex world and sometimes technology fails. The question is have we built a market structure that is fail-safe? And in this case it looks like we have. The market was shut down and Nasdaq took their time to get the reopen right. They started with some test symbols. They phased it in. Rather than with Facebook where they rushed and messed up and generated losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Here they took their time and at first glance, it looks like they had a fair and orderly reopen of the market," he said.
The outage led to what was easily the lowest full-session volume of the year, with about 4.23 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq, well below the daily average of 6.3 billion.
The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI rose 66.19 points or 0.44 percent, to 14,963.74, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 14.16 points or 0.86 percent, to 1,656.96 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 38.918 points or 1.08 percent, to 3,638.707.
The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC was up 31.38 points, or 0.87 percent, at 3,631.17 when the trading halt began, putting the brakes on trading in stocks of such well-known companies as Apple (AAPL.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Amazon.com (AMZN.O).
Microsoft ended the session as the biggest boost to both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 .NDX indexes, up 2.5 percent to $32.39. Apple edged up 0.1 percent to $502.96 while Amazon closed 1.8 percent higher at $289.73.
Throughout the Nasdaq outage, other exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange continued to operate.
The Dow industrials rose for the first time in seven sessions after upbeat data from the world's top economies overshadowed nervousness over the winding down of the Federal Reserve's stimulus program.
Gains in the Dow were limited by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N), which tumbled 12.5 percent to $22.22 a day after reporting a decline in the Enterprise Group's revenue. The group is the computer company's second-largest division and a critical component of Chief Executive Meg Whitman's plan to transform the company.
The S&P 500 registered its biggest percentage gain since August 1, but was unable to close above its 50-day moving average for a fifth straight session. The mark, now at 1,658.87, has become a technical hurdle.
Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 2,551 to 479, while on the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners 1,964 to 519. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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