Imagine this: you’re driving to the office the very first day on the job. As you casually hang a right into the parking lot, you begin thinking of how you are going to leave a stellar first impression on your co-workers and management, since you know that first impressions mean everything. Pulling into the first spot you see right in front of the entrance, you jump the curb and slam into the front of the building as your car bursts into flames while your hood flattens the reception desk against the back of the wall.
Now imagine this is how employees of the alternative stock exchange BATS must feel after the first half of today. On the day of their auspicious IPO, their servers experienced a flash crash of 9% in Apple stock causing it to halt trading. With shares of BATS already priced at the lower end of the range of the quickly approaching IPO, things couldn’t get much worse… right?
Wrong. BATS own stock follows the footsteps of AAPL with their own flash crash, briefly trading at .04 before being halted and those trades being canceled.
Does your day seem a bit better now?