Serviços críticos do Estado ganham margem para comprar viaturas

[Dracull]

Muito interessante a situação relatada Ulisses...Faz-nos recear um crash originado simplesmente por computadores a crasharem e falta de confiança dos investidores no sistema do nasdaq.

[Ulisses Pereira]

"Nasdaq's Blunder Could Be NYSE's Boon"

By James J. Cramer
12/08/2003 09:20 AM EST

"Today's the day that John Reed can make himself a hero of the NYSE. Or he simply can sit back and ignore what happened in Corinthian Colleges (COCO:Nasdaq - commentary - research) on Friday.

I'm betting he ignores it because, frankly, Reed's not a trader, and like all nontraders, he wouldn't have a clue about why people are mad as heck at the Nasdaq and its many derivatives.


On Friday, the Nasdaq halted trading in Corinthian after a big break in the stock and then cancelled all trades done in Corinthian between 10:46 a.m. EST and 10:58 a.m. EST.

In other words, you got a do-over if you sold one million Corinthian into the morass, or, more importantly, if you were the house that triggered the big decline with what turned out to be a keypunch error.

For those who think that mistakes are mistakes and you have to pay for them, this little exercise in trade-breaking makes you think twice. If I had a nickel for every time I had a trade break caused by a malfunction or a keypunch, I would be able to own the Philadelphia Eagles right now instead of just watching them.

But this isn't the NFL. This is the Nazz, where they break trades for big guys, but not small guys, especially when millions might be lost.

It is worse. The Nasdaq machines were in a state of pure chaos Friday. The organization, whoever that really is, first issued a statement saying that Corinthian was halted for news. That was totally and completely wrong. There was no news.

Then it said that the stock was halted for "extraordinary market activity." Huh? That's a reason to halt? You play on when that happens. You play through. But the machines and the people who run them had no order going on. In fact, the Nasdaq, rather than being repentant, immediately decided to launch a misdirection play, calling the media and blaming the problems on Archipelago. On Friday I got a call from some nameless gnome at Nasdaq attempting to put the focus on Archipelago, but when I reminded her that had I traded for 20 years and that the real issue was that the Nazz broke trades because it lost control of the situation and some big guy hollered for help, my Deep Throat went hush on me.


For months I have had to listen to the whines of those left behind by Dick Grasso about why the NYSE should be preserved. Frankly, they can keep whining. As long as the real clients, the institutions that trade, lose no opportunity to badmouth them, they are going to be history.

But finally, in one action -- the COCO trade break -- the NYSE has something to crow about. I could just see Grasso and the governors going to the booth where COCO was trading as soon as there was a big break in the stock -- they have great software to flag that stuff -- and them straightening it out on the fly as humans can do, no doubt not breaking any trades, which is what cowards and favored accounts do. Grasso would not be some faceless gnome making calls in the background, blasting Instinent or Archipelago or any other insurgent. He would have said, "There was a mess, and it was fixed instantly."


Or maybe you wouldn't have heard about it at all because it wouldn't have happened.

Of course, John Reed is the Nasdaq's Trojan horse over at the NYSE. I saw nothing anywhere in the papers or on television about the NYSE taking advantage of this. When I talked about it on Friday, I was the only person I know who seemed to be upset about it, with the exception of a couple of hedge funds, and, alas, Floyd Norris in The New York Times. Good company.

In case the Grasso disciples really have been silenced, the rap about the specialist system is that it isn't perfect but in times of chaos, it's nice to know that a group of men and women around a booth can exert rationality when machines can't. It doesn't work as well as machines when everything goes right; in fact it can be a tax on the system.

But then again, you don't get a lot of broken trades over at the NYSE and most certainly there are, as in the NFL, no do-overs. "

(in www.realmoney.com)