Berkshire Hathaway Down 99.5% | Hacker News Reader

Berkshire Hathaway Down 99.5%

google.com

59 pointsevilotto21 comments

Berkshire Hathaway’s stock price is too high for Nasdaq computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044044 - May 2021 (274 comments)

Berkshire Hathaway’s Stock Price vs. 32-Bit Integers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27065853 - May 2021 (69 comments)

It is not really down (obviously) but its price overflowed the range for a 32 bit unsigned integer and so, from what I understand, at least some software has apparently problems to display the price properly.

Yes, various other stories about it. I find it amusing that some finance sites like Yahoo Finance and ETrade (those are the only ones I checked) are correctly displaying the price at 431998 or thereabouts, and some are not. Different APIs in use by the different sites? Or are they special casing all stocks with a share price above 400k? (yeah, there's only one)

I am going to guess that a few weeks back there was a scramble at various brokerages to ensure that they do not allow people to buy BRK.A at an absurdly low price, and it is all a huge mess while they wait on NASDAQ to correct the error.

The important question is can I buy it at 99.5% off?

For posterity this is how Google reports the price right now, -99.36%:

https://i.imgur.com/7ApHJ3p.png

Heh thanks for this. Always interesting when looking back at old threads and half of the required context is just gone.

Hilarious. I wonder how many bots have tried to take the bait

It wouldn't matter would it? The bot makes a whole lot of $1 bids and finds no sellers, life carries on.

For bots that might want to sell the stock this would likely be a large enough jump to trip a circuit breaker.

But really this was a display bug. It's possible some bot is still using 32 bit unsigned ints internally, but it would have to be pretty badly designed since this issue has been obvious and a long time coming.

Bot behavior under improbable scenarios is a function of its author's paranoia. I'm sure you're right about the vast majority of bots, but I'll be much more amused than surprised if it happens

  if $PRICE < 20% of $LAST_PRICE:
    # flash crash, don't be picky, time to make money!!
    submit_market_order()

Edit: Fixed formatting

Indent everything you want code-formatted. Lose the backticks, they're just noise

TIL. Thanks!

Yeah I can see nothing wrong with this except for stock splits, dividends, etc.

You don't even actually match up buyers and sellers on the public markets anymore for stocks. Individuals (from retail to institutional investors) buy and sell to market makers; later, when settling, market makers will pair up with brokers when clearing the funds.

So it'd be up to the market makers to not fuck up and sell at $1. If not, it's their liability.

bad bots that don't have guards against bids that look too good to be true

Someone even suggested a $1 limit in the thread discussing the potential overflow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27045382 I'm still surprised this actually happened.

Luckily there's no BUY NOW button on that page.

HODL

What's the best advice here... sell, buy, or divide by zero?

I'd try Right Shift first.

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