(Bloomberg) — The battle for control of a critical data service responsible for distributing stock prices for U.S. companies like Apple Inc. remains unresolved.
Yesterdays vote by the committee that oversees the primary way prices for corporations listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market are distributed ended without agreement on which company would run the service, according to people familiar with the matter. Nine out of 15 votes were cast for Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., while six went to Tradeworx Inc.s Thesys Technologies LLC, the people said. Ten votes are required to pick a winner.
The importance of the securities information processor, or SIP, was highlighted in August 2013 when a malfunction at Nasdaq halted trading in Apple, Google Inc. and thousands of other stocks for three hours. This weeks vote was the culmination of a months long bidding process after Nasdaq decided to end its previous agreement to run the SIP.
The committee will try again on Oct. 15, according to some of the people, who asked to not be identified because the process is private.
The six votes in favor of Thesys came from Bats Global Markets Inc., which has four votes because it operates that many stock exchanges, as well as CHX Holdings Inc.s Chicago Stock Exchange and Deutsche Boerse AGs International Securities Exchange, the people said.
Nasdaq cast three votes for itself, according to the people. It also got three votes from Intercontinental Exchange Inc.s NYSE Group Inc. and one apiece from CBOE Holdings Inc., the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the National Stock Exchange, the people said.
SECs Midas
Bloomberg News reported in January that Nasdaq didnt plan to remain in charge of the system. It later reconsidered and bid for the contract.
Tradeworx, which runs a trading operation as well as a technology division, already has ties to an important piece of stock market infrastructure. The SEC acquired its surveillance system, Midas, from the Red Bank, New Jersey-based firm. Midas, an acronym for Market Information Data Analytics System, collects about 1 billion trading records a day from U.S. equity exchanges, giving the regulator more complete data than traders and researchers get from the SIP.
