Nasdaq Triggers Market-Wide Circuit-Breaker As AMZN “Crashes” 87% After-Hours

Nasdaq has issued a market-wide trading halt amid what appears to be a “glitch” that sent a number of the largest Nasdaq-listed stocks to crash or spike to exactly $123.47 per share.

This move crashed the value of companies including Amazon and Apple, sparked chaos in Microsoft, while sending Zynga rocketing up more than 3000%.

On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday and in after-hours trading, The FT reports that market data show that companies such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and Zynga were repriced at $123.47.

The Bloomberg data terminal listed either “market wide circuit breaker halt — level 2” or “volatility trading pause” on all the stocks affected.

 

The glitch did not affect any market trading, including after hours.

The mysterious reset to $123.47 per share meant that Amazon in theory saw its share price marked down 87.2 per cent…

while shares in Apple fell 14.3 per cent…

But Nasdaq-listed Microsoft had jumped 79.1 per cent — which would value the company at nearly $1tn…

As Bloomberg reports, the apparent swings triggered trading halts in some securities, according to automatically generated messages. The halts are a mechanism exchanges use to limit the impact of particularly volatile sessions. A system status alert on Nasdaq’s website said that systems were operating normally at 8:23 p.m. ET. After-market hours on Nasdaq typically last from 4 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

In a statement, Nasdaq said the glitch was related to “improper use of test data” sent out to third party data providers, and said it was working to “ensure a prompt resolution of this matter”. In cases of any clearly erroneous data, trades made are cancelled.

As a reminder this is not the first time ‘glitches’ have occurred on holidays… remember gold on Thanksgiving 2014.