Monday, September 03, 2012

Skin in the game - indeed

Finance is in need of a technological revolution - FT.com: "Less than two months before the Facebook fiasco, another IPO suffered an even more shocking fate. BATS Global Markets, which operates the third-largest stock exchange in the US, went public on its own exchange. If ever an organisation had sufficient “skin in the game” to get it right, it was BATS and if ever there was a time when getting it right really mattered, it was on the day of BATS’s own IPO. So when BATS debuted at an opening price of $15.25, no one expected it to plunge to less than a tenth of a penny in a second and a half due to a software error affecting stocks whose ticker symbols began with the letter A or B. The ensuing confusion was so great that BATS suspended trading in its own stock and ultimately cancelled its IPO."

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