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Comment by nopzor | Hacker News Reader

This story isn't emphasizing an important point: the stock price of many tech companies - amazon, google, Microsoft - were pegged to exactly $123.46 for multiple hours.

This is likely 123.456 rounded to 2 decimals.

To me this smells like a software testing bug or hack, rather than "stocks crashing"

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The NYSE did exactly the same f*ckup in 2014. And as I would expect will happen this time, the NYSE did not care because it is a bank holiday in the US, but it is not in the rest of the world, and I saw many people complaining on forums that their brokers automatically closed their positions or made big margin calls.

So this is a pretty bad mistake.

There's no due diligence expected on the broker's part? Or was the accurate data simply not available to them by any means?

Well, the official price normally comes directly from the exchange. Brokers protect themselves against their exposure to their clients by reacting to the markets live. The exchange should be the authoritative source for prices.

Turns out they are scraping price data, the bots must have failed!

I saw it pegged at 123.47

rounding

Rounding from what? 123.456 to 123.47?

maybe 2 passes? 123.45678... -> 123.4568 (4 decimal places is common in finance) then to 2 places for the retail muppets 123.46

Stocks have two prices. I guess this would be reflected in test data.

Bid/ask?

Good eye. That was probably the case.

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