Nasdaq “test” data gets published, causing confusion over tech stocks

Early close before July 4 caught some data providers off guard.

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[bratkitty]

I work for one of the big 3 multinational data vendors.

...

Bloomberg, FactSet, and/or Thompson-Reuters

So you must work for FactSet

I mean, they're big but they're not TR-big.

 

[bratkitty]

The more I learn about the markets, the more I'm convinced that the guys running it are inept morons.

As TFA said, and as has been pointed out a few times in the comments, already, this wasn't Nasdaq's fault.
Bloomberg and whatever other data vendors released it to the public are the ones to blame.

The change control processes around everything in the financial industry are nuts. I know. I work for one of the big 3 multinational data vendors. This stuff is pretty well-communicated and there's plenty of advance notice given. The fact this happened at all can probably be traced back to one or two people at each organization that let it leak who were supposed to have thrown some sort of switch before the test, but didn't because they ducked out of the office early for the holiday and were on the road or something.
And I'm sure they got paged and had a stern postmortem with their superiors and half their department, once it was over.

Of all the things that could go wrong in all these systems, this was probably one of the "best" things that could have gone wrong while still being client-facing. Much less destructive to real dollars than an outright outage or bad data during market hours.
And this is also one of the reasons why most investment bankers don't just rely on a single platform to do their jobs. Many IB firms have a mix of Bloomberg, FactSet, and/or Thompson-Reuters workstations for the various strengths each platform has.

Good to know we're all inept morons, though. Nice to have a reality check from time to time...

Also, totally. I used to be a data consumer, using direct feeds, at one of the big international banks, doing software in equities.

News like this usually go out months in advance. They typically, but not always, pick random Saturdays to do industry-wide tests though, and not one of the lightest-staffed days in the year where when something like this happens people won't be around to catch. Also the advantage of doing this on a Saturday (instead of hours after) is that we'd have more time to triple-check our work to make sure things don't break.

I won't lay all the blame at Nasdaq, but their choice of timing was incredibly poor. I'm surprised they didn't push back harder.