[Fair use for education and research purpose only]

May 2, 2000 1:25 PM

Title: Data Glitch Sends Wrong Nasdaq 100 Numbers to Individual Investors

By Lawrence Carrel

MANY INDIVIDUAL INVESTORS received incorrect values on the Nasdaq 100 index during the first 25 minutes of trading today due to errors in data sent by the Nasdaq Stock Market to about 100 vendors of market quotes.

Between 9:30 a.m. ET and 9:55 a.m., incorrect values for the index were disseminated through the Nasdaq Trade Dissemination Service to market data vendors.

"We don't know why, but it had something to do with the opening market value of the index, and that figures into calculating the current value of the index," says Nasdaq spokesman Wayne Lee. "As a result of the calculating problem, incorrect values were disseminated via the NTDS.... We are still trying to determine why."

Lee emphasizes that professional traders "always had access to the correct information, because they have Nasdaq Workstation II."

Workstation II is the internal information network that accesses Nasdaq quotes, lists the firms trading stocks and executes the trades. "Workstation II was correct," Lee says.

There are a couple of different systems calculating the value of the index simultaneously, according to Lee. While Workstation II had no problems, the system that provides the information to the Nasdaq Trade Dissemination Service was calculating it incorrectly.

The firms receiving data via the service include Bridge Information Services, Reuters and Dow Jones (DJ). Dow Jones owns SmartMoney.com in a joint venture with Hearst Publications.

The Help Desk at Bridge Information Systems said Nasdaq had notified it after 9:55 a.m. that "some of the numbers were suspect." The desk said Nasdaq said it would resend the accurate numbers.

At Quote.com, a popular Web site where investors get quotes, Jay Frank, a member of the Data Integrity Department said its numbers were accurate today because it gets them from a service offered by the Chicago Board of Options Exchange.

At myTrack.com, another investing site, director of marketing Rafi Reguer, said his company wasn't affected because it provides Workstation II information for traders.

http://www.smartmoney.com/smt/bn/index.cfm?story=20000502012547

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), May 02, 2000

Answers

Isn't this about the fifth time in the past two months or so that NASDAQ has had some kind of computer glitch?

-- Wellesley (wellesley@freeport.net), May 03, 2000.