What happened on the Nasdaq tonight?

[ardhill]

Anyone know why a bunch of Nasdaq stocks tanked big time for a few ticks tonight? Did someone just dump thousands of stocks on the market with little regards for the lack of volume, or something else?

The screen shots are typical of what just happened on a whole load of stocks across the Nasdaq.

These are 25 tick charts.

 

[ChartMan]

Data glitch?

 

[ardhill]

I thought of that so I went onto www.prophet.net and saw the same thing. Unless it was the supply of data to the feeds?

I did see a bunch of low 'trades' on my time and sales, but not on the L2.

 

[roguetrader]

Interesting general spike in volume on Naz at this time

 

[knucklehead]

amzn's website went down for half and hour, someone got nervous!

Market maker lowering price to the low for the day to scare or take out stops !!! (no their's more than one).

could be a mistaken order that was executed by a novice who just started in january....Oops !

Or chinese whispers..... I said sell 10k of each not 100k.....my new hearing aid has arrived

 

[nagula]

I checked my charts for amzn and ebay and I don't get the extreme down ticks?
I do see very high vol around 19:00gmt in a lot of stocks though, weird.

 

[ardhill]

I checked my charts for amzn and ebay and I don't get the extreme down ticks?
I do see very high vol around 19:00gmt in a lot of stocks though, weird.

Here is a couple from www.prophet.net

My other charts were from TradeStation, and the data was from them also.

 

[roguetrader]

I have those spikes on eSignal as well

 

[nagula]

hmm, I should look into why I havent got those extreme spikes then..

 

[ardhill]

Unless of course a T2W member was just testing out their new automated trading system, but it needed a few more tweaks before going live. Such as knowing that $29 is not a good price to pay for a stock that is currently trading at $28.10.

Maybe their buy limit and sell limit got mixed up?

Just a thought.

 

[roguetrader]

Probably just a rogue sell program kicked in.

 

[Mr. Charts]

Esignal shows data glitches, but I use a back up of quote.com which was normal.
Richard

 

[ardhill]

Strange, this was some glitch. It took place over quite a few stocks and as you can the the volume was pretty strong as well.

Could this really happen, I mean three data providers all showing a similar glitch at the same time which was not just a rogue tick but a ton of extra trades, pushing the volume up as well as the price over a period of time?

The charts from prophet.net above were 1 min charts, you can see how many bars of high volume there were.

Hmm knowing computers, I suppose it could happen, being a key time in the US stock day and all that.

 

[Mr. Charts]

HI ardhill,
I have not seen any comment on my news feeds about this and although one can hypothesise I can't see any evidence of anything other than a glitch......YET.
Perhaps it was a dummy run for an terrorist electronic attack by Mr. Bed Linen and his associates.........
Richard

 

[DaveJB]

I don't think it's just three - I had a rather disappointing long trade on SUNW sitting there (a cheap way to reinforce the advice on not trading the doldrums, if nothing more fruitful than that on this occasion). Got dragged (kicking and screaming) away from 6.46 - 7.02 pm and saw a spike up of about 25c or so on eSignal when I got back. (Too late, naturally). My spike was UP, incidentally.

I checked my SB account and the SUNW chart there showed the same spike up... up to that point I thought it a data glitch, but that makes at least 4 feeds as I use Capital Spreads whose charts are from Tenfore.
Dave

 

[ardhill]

Someone on the TradeStation forum suggested:

"I got them too. They are bad ticks and not real trades. I think ARCA had problems today TradeStation's data feed picked them up."

This was another user and not a TS employee, so I don't know how much factual information is behind this statement, but it would answer a few rather intriguing questions, like why so many data feeds got them, and why my L2 screen didn't appear to react to the trades.

With the L2 lack of reaction, I just assumed that the rogue trades all went directly through a MM, and he just said thanks very much, I'll have some cheap stock. Of course, I was only looking at the level 2 screen on one stock at the time it happened.

 

[nagula]

This was posted on ET
"arca was down routing through the NBBO system. Was a mess"