While the rest of the financial industry is driving their kids to soccer practice, visiting the farmers market or sleeping in, a team of officials from the New York Stock Exchange and traders from assorted investment firms will simulate the forthcoming Twitter IPO tomorrow morning.
Set to take place from roughly 7:30 am until 10:30 am tomorrow morning, a team of NYSE technologists will stress-test a simulation of the much anticipated IPO for the social media giant.
This publically announced testing aims to root out any possible technology glitches that plagued the 2012 trading debut of Facebook on Nasdaq OMX. The troubled launch lead to orders not being fulfilled, market makers losing money and complaints to regulators. Nasdaq eventually paid a $10 million fine to regulators – the largest amount levied against a stock exchange, according to Reuters – and volunteered to pay investment firms $62 million for their losses.
Industry observers have speculated that the Facebook IPO debacle may have been one reason that Nasdaq lost the Twitter listing to the NYSE.
NYSE is taking the launch of the microblogging giant seriously. Weare being very methodical in our planning for Twitters IPO, and are working together with the industry to ensure a world class experience for Twitter, retail investors and all market participants, a NYSE Euronext spokesman told Traders Magazine.
The NYSE spokesman declined to reveal which investment and financial services firms are participating in the IPO test but added that the exchange will offer a brief comment on the tests on Monday morning.
In a press statement, NYSE announced that all production customer gateway connections will be made available for order flow. Public SIP and proprietary market data and imbalance feeds will be available over production channels.
The NYSE released a Market Operations Update, an e-mail that revealed some parameters of the October 26th test:
- The following configurations will be in place:
- All production Common Customer Gateway (CCG) connections and drop copy lines will be available
- All proprietary data products (NYSE OpenBook Ultra, Alerts, Best Trades and Quotes, etc.) will be available on production channels
- All SIP feeds (Consolidated Trades and Consolidated Quotes) will be available on production channels
- Three new symbols will be added to support this test
Ticker Name Target IPO Price
- 1. IPOA IPO Test Symbol A $20.00
- 2. IPOB IPO Test Symbol B $30.00
- 3. IPOC IPO Test Symbol C $40.00
According to press reports, some estimates for the Twitter opening price could be between $17 and $20 per share.
No date has been given for the Twitter IPO but media speculation says it could be in late November.
