Sun, 25 Mar 2012 06:59:13 GMT - High Frequency Trading Review
You think you had a bad day?
Bats Global Markets Inc. (BATS), the six-year-old equity exchange, saw its debut as a public company go haywire, as system errors that caused its computers to spew bad quotes and halted Apple Inc. (AAPL) forced the cancellation of its first day of trading.
“It’s a pretty inauspicious start,” Sam Ginzburg, a partner and head of capital markets at First New York Securities LLC, a New York-based proprietary trading firm, said today in a phone interview.
Data received by Bloomberg showed Bats’s shares, the first ever to be listed on its Lenexa, Kansas-based market, traded for pennies following the initial public offering at $16. Those transactions were later voided and Bats said no trades in its stock today would stand. At the same time, a single execution on its venue of 100 shares of Apple, the world’s most valuable company, triggered a circuit breaker that paused the shares.
