Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Got a relatively weak bounce today after yesterday’s excitement.

Here’s a look at today’s market heat map after the close. There’s a lot of green, but this was pretty unenthusiastic.

I wasn’t too impressed with John Thain on CNBC today explaining yesterday’s weirdness with the NYSE trading and reporting systems. The official story seems to be that the systems that compute the DJIA got backlogged with transactions, and separately an internal messaging system for floor traders also got backlogged, so they’re upgrading their servers. Today they had to delay closing a number of stocks to allow transaction queues to clear at the end of the day. Thain mentioned a volume of over 20,000 msgs/second. This is all plausible, but not reassuring. It sounds like something that would happen to a growing e-commerce site, not one of the world’s largest stock exchanges. I wonder how much reserve throughput they can actually deploy. If we get a “real” market crash, they’re going to have to handle a lot more than the 2.4 billion shares they traded yesterday.

Update Thursday 03-01-2007 0616 PST - Premarket looks pretty messy this morning so far.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Finance/Investing, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.