Friday June 29 3:32 PM ET

Nasdaq Systems Fail for 2nd Straight Day NEW YORK (Reuters) - Technology problems on Nasdaq's computer system on Friday afternoon forced the No. 2 U.S. stock market to halt trading for the second straight day.

Nasdaq was having a problem with its network, which was affecting price quotes for stocks, a Nasdaq spokesman said.

Details of the problem were not immediately available but the spokesman said the market had suspended trading on its SOES and SelectNet stock order routing systems.

Monitors appeared to show that trading had resumed but that could not be immediately confirmed.

On Thursday, Nasdaq was forced to shut down its systems after traders reported problems entering price quotes shortly after trading in Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) resumed following a halt of more than three hours. Nasdaq shut down its SelectNet and SOES stock trading systems at 3:02 p.m. EDT. The quote systems were fixed and trading was restarted 18 minutes later.

Nasdaq, which trades around 2 billion shares a day on average, recently has encountered problems with its trading systems, including a SelectNet failure earlier in June. The system also went down for about 15 minutes in March, and a handful of erroneous trades entered into the system in February caused the Nasdaq Composite Index (^IXIC - news) to falsely spike up 14 percent.

Nasdaq's new trading system, nicknamed SuperSOES, is scheduled to be implemented on July 8. SuperSOES, which Nasdaq has said has performed well in testing, enables traders to process more trades automatically.

Technology problems also have plagued the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq's main rival. A problem with new trading software caused the Big Board to halt trading on its entire floor for nearly 90 minutes on June 8.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20010629/bs/markets_nasdaq_dc_2.html

-- Carl Jenkins (somewherepress@aol.com), June 29, 2001

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DJ Nasdaq/After-Hours Trading -2: Trading Ended At 5 PM

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. canceled its after-hours trading session that usually runs until 6:30 p.m. EDT. Nasdaq extended its regular session trading until 5 p.m. EDT.

-- PHO (owennos@bigfoot.com), June 29, 2001.