It is every Londoner’s duty to revel in the recent embarrassments of the US financial markets.
First, New York and Chicago’s exchanges are claimed to be so vulnerable that a day-trader in Hounslow can single-handedly bring them to their knees.
Then we see Nasdaq can’t even send out a price-sensitive earnings release for one of its most famous clients without screwing up.
Nasdaq blamed its early leak of Twitter’s poor results on an “operational error”. Meaningless.
But the detail now emerging is extraordinary: Nasdaq charges for an additional service that runs company’s investor relations websites for them, including Twitter’s.
By accident, the clowns at this division stuck up Twitter’s earnings on the social media group’s IR page before the public release.
The “leaked” figures were, in turn, spotted and tweeted to the world by a financial news company backed by the old Thomson Reuters boss Tom Glocer.
Result: Nasdaq’s money-grabbing extension of its core business into the outsourcing game means traders in the know sold Twitter like crazy before the rest of the market knew what was going on.
It’s not the first time. Nasdaq’s cack-handed IR service has failed before with price sensitive releases from JPMorgan, Microsoft and the economic indicators from ADP.
They add to its litany of other failures, too: remember the Facebook float debacle?
Don’t expect US regulators to do much: they prefer attacking Brits. But let’s hope the London Stock Exchange wins business as a result.
