As the Knight Capital trading fiasco once again proved, in the race to be first, crashes will happen. But slowing down today’s high-speed marketplace would be akin to going back to the Stone Ages for market participants. High-speed trading is here to stay, and strategies will continue to grow more complex. But over the past two years, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which an inability to harness the latest technologies that power our markets has cost industry players dearly — both in lost dollars and lost investor trust. Advanced Trading highlights Wall Street’s five biggest tech fails in the past two years.
August 03, 2012
BATS Global Markets’ Failed IPO, March 23, 2012
Before Facebook went public, BATS’s initial public offering was known as the worst IPO of all time. In a scene that conjured images of the Flash Crash, the exchange operator withdrew its IPO after a rogue algorithm drove down the stock’s price from $15.25 to about 2 cents in less than one second. It also led conspiracy theorists to speculate about whether a malicious algo was set off on purpose to keep BATS from going public, where it would compete directly with Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange for corporate listings.
[BATS Flash Crash: Here's What Happened]
