Amazon went down 87 percent, and Zynga was up 3,292 percent
A data glitch briefly made online games group Zynga more valuable than Goldman Sachs when prices of a host of Nasdaq-listed stocks including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft were reset to exactly $123.47. The new prices triggered halts in many of the stocks in after-hours trading and implied that Amazon had lost $398bn in market capitalisation, while Zynga rocketed more than 3,000 per cent. The prices were apparently test data that are routinely sent out by US exchanges, including Nasdaq, at the end of each trading day, but which some vendors then used as live figures. At the $123.47 price, shares in Apple fell 14.3 per cent. But Microsoft jumped 79.1 per cent, which would value the company at nearly $1tn, while Zynga’s share price leapt 3,292 per cent. New York Stock Exchange data were unaffected. Typically, vendors discard the test prices when checks are done. While the reason this did not happen for Nasdaq on Monday is not known, there was speculation it was linked to changed timings on the eve of the US Independence Day holiday...
