Thursday’s “Flash Freeze” flat-lined popular Nasdaq stocks for hours along with one of the market’s most heavily traded exchange traded funds and other ETFs with primary listings on the Nasdaq.
The Nasadaq-100 ETF, PowerShares QQQ (Nasdaq GIDS: QQQ), was still up 1% Thursday after the Nasdaq exchange paused trading for three hours. QQQ is one of the most active ETFs by trading volume.
The trading disruption affected thousands of Nasdaq-listed stocks, including Google (NasdaqGS: GOOG), Apple (NadaqGS: AAPL) and Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT).
“It’s really shocking. We’re stuck,” Ramon Verastegui, head of global engineering and strategy at Société Générale, said in a Wall Street Journal report. “If we want to trade Apple, we can’t.”
The halt impacted buying and selling in dozens of Nasdaq-listed ETFs, including iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (Nasdaq GIDS IBB) and iShares S&P India Nifty Fifty ETF (Nasdaq GIDS: INDY), among others, ETF Guide reports.
“We’re pulling out our orders to wait until the system works itself out,” Rick Fier, director of equity trading at Conifer Securities, said in the WSJ article. “The best thing clients can do is take a break.”
It’s never a good time for major trading outages. However, the Nasdaq was lucky enough to dodge a bullet with the technology glitch occurring during a lazy summer trading day with no big economic and market news.
Still, Thursday’s problem was another black eye for Nasdaq. The Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB) initial public offering last year was marred by system problems.