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Comment by snprbob86 | Hacker News Reader

Despite witnessing countless "enterprise" systems built out of bubble gum and popsicle sticks, I still have a hard time believing that Nasdaq really couldn't handle this technically... I'm not sure what to make of this.

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At least one person on here complained about it earlier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993787 It could well be true, after all there were half a billion trades today on FB alone.

82 million trades for FB in the first 30 seconds.

I have no idea if that's a lot or not, but it's pretty impressive to build a system capable of doing that.

As a point of comparison, NASDAQ handled trades for 750 million shares in 1.1 seconds for last year's Russell Reconstitution[1], one of the busiest equity trading days of the year.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Indexes#Annual_reconsti...

Trading systems are trivially shardable by symbol or letter range; not so much help for a single symbol as in the case of an IPO.

They said 82 million shares were traded. That doesn't mean 82M trades. A trade often has a quantity higher than 1 share. It could be (say) 82 thousand trades with an average quantity of 1000 shares. As far as system performance is concerned, number of trades matter, number of traded shares don't.

This is no more outlandish than thinking that BATS can't handle their own IPO due to technical issues ;)

I read it as a PR push and an implication of deus ex machina for the lack of spike in their share price.

There's been a lot of stories lately about these financial platforms falling apart.

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