Who halts the trading? Is it a normal circumstance before earnings reports are released, or does it have something to do with the magnitude of the miss?
These are today's on NASDAQ http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=TradeHalts
I wonder how exactly that works. What kind of news does it apply to? Is it common? Can a company ask for a trading halt on its own before it releases bad results?
This is one of the reasons why companies often release their quarterly results after market close. It allows all relevant parties to be able to access the latest information before selling resumes.
If this wasn't the case, then users with the fastest connections would be able to process, and react to the data before others in the market had a chance to do so as well.
2) Many HFT firms do not specialize in 'news-reading'. That is, they will sit out periods when an expected announcement is coming. You can observe this by looking at the liquidity of a product just prior to an expected relevant news release - there will be very few orders.
3) There are more events than just news events that require speed.
you can sell your assets outside the marketplace just fine.
if they just allow orderbooks to get skewed more and more in one direction you just run head first into a potential macro crash and sometimes thats just a little more important than you wanting to unload your 60 bucks of stock.
And I'm pretty sure there's government regulation requiring them to do this.
>And I'm pretty sure there's government regulation requiring them to do this.
And who runs the government, empirically speaking?
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
everyone can do that. you can take your 30 shares of random company x to your mom and sign a contract with her buying the shares.
anyone can do that.
stock exchanges are private businesses with private rules about who can and can not use their servers. they're open from 9:30 to 5. if you want to buy during other hours, you better find someone to buy from.
as far as the "look people are evil here's ONE ARTICLE of evidence" paradigm goes - its a bit lame. for further reading, google selection bias.
if you read my post, i'm not saying that this is good or bad. its just fact.
forex goes down during all news. doesnt mean that big banks cant trade with each other during news. doesn't mean that you can't walk into a commercial bank at noon and buy some currency. it just means that one exchange doesn't want your business during news because they'll potentially enter significant counterparty risk.
they just exercise their right of refusing to do business with you. doesn't matter that its automated through software. if I know for a fact I don't want to buy from door to door salesmen at 5am and turn my doorbell off during the night, its conceptually the same thing. you cant have it both ways. you can't only have "capitalism" when its good for you. you're either free to enter contracts or you're not.
and in case that's somehow not clear: stock exchanges are private for-profit companies. they're not institutions bound to some weird codified public goodwill. whether thats a good or bad thing is for you to decide.
Free market applies to every market participant equally. Your privilege is the counterparties obligation. Do you believe other market participants should be forced to buy your stock while the stock is obviously crashing just so you can get a favorable outcome?
And because you seem to be clouded by little man nerdrage: The stock market doesn't temporarily shut trading down to keep smalltime hobby gamblers out. They do this to prevent institutional investors from unloading in a hurry which would send macro signals that may signal that one market participant knows more than the others ("insider trading") which would then kick off an avalanche of tag-alongs who believe they have to sell as well, eventually moving the needle on the entire economy which would then cost the suckers who you are so desperately fighting for to lose their jobs. do you want that? good.
Google black friday if you want to know why. it is not done to sucker 2k live savings gamblers out of their money.
A free market creates all kinds of poor outcomes for example.
Me:Do you think that American consumers should have to buy their lifesaving drugs at a few thousand percent markup from a company that manipulated the FDA in order to obtain a monopoly on a 100 year old drug?
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/heres-why-your-a...
Wall Street: Yes, free market.
Later that day...
Me: This stock is falling I want to sell.
Wall Street: Nope. Market protections kicked in you see.