Monday October 16 3:52 PM ET Glitch in Nasdaq Delays Message Traffic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Nasdaq stock market said a technical glitch in its SelectNet order routing system caused a delay in message traffic being sent over the system on Monday morning.

A broker-dealer told Nasdaq of the delay at 11:10 a.m. EDT, a Nasdaq spokesman said. Technicians at the No. 2 stock market traced the problem to a faulty processor by 11:23 a.m. The technicians reset the processor, which allowed SelectNet to start working through the messages that had built up in the system.

The system was back to normal by 11:28 a.m., the spokesman said.

Market watchers are scrutinizing Nasdaq's technology as it revamps it system to handle the government-ordered shift to trading stocks in pennies rather than fractions. The shift is expected to cause a surge in message traffic, or trading data that filter through the computer systems of the U.S. markets every time a quote changes.

Agency brokerage Instinet Corp., which runs an electronic trading network, said it had to pull its quotes off of the Nasdaq display montage for 32 minutes on Monday morning because of slowness on SelectNet. Instinet is a unit of global news and information company Reuters Group Plc. (RTR.L) (NasdaqNM:RTRSY - news)

Bloomberg Tradebook pulled its quotes off of Nasdaq for about 25 minutes, Tradebook Chief Operating Officer Bruce Garland said.

``Anybody can have a problem,'' Garland said. ``But you always have to question what sort of redundancy is built in, particularly to a system as critical to the industry as SelectNet.''

Nasdaq was still investigating how the processor failed and the spokesman was unable to say how many stock orders had been affected.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001016/bs/nasdaq_glitch_dc_1.html

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), October 16, 2000

Answers

The first six months of this year had a lot of technial shortcoming type trading problems. Now they seem few and far between.

-- RogerT (rogerT@c-zone.net), October 16, 2000.