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NYSE will temporarily move to all-electronic stock trading
If you thought it was incredibly risky to have legions of traders gather at the New York Stock Exchange in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, you're not the only one. Intercontinental Exchange is temporarily closing the physical NYSE floors in New York and San Francisco on March 23rd in favor of all-electronic trading. Business and regulatory oversight will carry on during the usual hours -- traders just won't get to use "open-outcry" (that is, the classic yelling) to buy or sell shares.
UK investigates if cyberattack led to stock exchange outage
UK officials are worried that a London Stock Exchange outage in August wasn't just the glitch that many suspected. Wall Street Journal sources say the GCHQ intelligence agency is investigating the possibility that the failure may have been due to a cyberattack. It's reportedly taking a close look at the associated code, including time stamps, to determine if there was any suspicious activity. The exchange was in the middle of updating its systems when the outage happened, and there's a fear this left systems open to attack.
SEC approves a stock exchange built for tech startups
For tech companies, going public is often fraught with pressure -- they're suddenly expected to deliver positive news every quarter, and they might push innovation to the wayside in the quest to become proftiable. They should soon have a better alternative, though. The SEC has approved the creation of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, a Silicon Valley-based platform aimed at tech startups that want to go public while taking their time to develop products and services. The exchange will have rules to limit executive bonuses, require more disclosure for milestones and reward long-term shareholders with more voting power.
Twitter quietly adds clickable stock symbols
It might not pack the same thrill as the rumors of in-feed video, but Twitter has added clickable stock symbols on tweets. This now throws up search results for both the stock and the company, using a new 'cash' tag, like $FB, to differentiate from typical links and tags. As noted by TNW, it's bad news for the founder of StockTwits, a service that offered similar functionality to gather tweet-based financial nuggets. The new feature is live across Twitter's web client -- though it hasn't hit TweetDeck just yet -- and should make discovering exactly how many millions companies have made (or lost) all a bit faster.
Nexon's Japanese IPO aims at raising $1.3 billion
When Nexon is finally added to the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December, the company has to be planning a massive "We're in the money!" song-and-dance to celebrate. TechCrunch reports that this will be the biggest IPO in Japan in 2011, with a corporate goal of raising $1.3 billion (100 billion yen) from the listing. The Korean company recently moved its headquarters from Seoul to Tokyo, and is well-known for its popular MMOs such as MapleStory, Mabinogi, and Vindictus. Nexon has over 3,000 people in its employ across the world, and previously said that it is open to purchasing more companies in Japan after the IPO. The company commented on its post-IPO strategy in a brief statement: "As we pursue our strategic objectives, we regularly review our options for accelerating our growth. We have made no decisions or announcements about any specific financing or other plans and cannot comment on rumors." The IPO will be handled by Nomura Securities, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Nexon is hoping that the move will raise its market cap to $9 billion, which will make it the biggest online gaming company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company is currently worth $7.7 billion.
Pandora Media offering IPO tomorrow
Music service Pandora is set to introduce its stock to the public tomorrow, becoming one more in a series of social networking and online service companies going with an IPO. Pandora isn't specifically an iOS company, of course, given that its music service runs both through browsers and on a number of platforms. But the company's iOS app has helped its profile. It's consistently stayed one of the top free apps on the App Store. The company's offering 14.7 million shares initially. Pandora's future wasn't ever in actual jeopardy, but certainly the value of the company's app was in question during the lead-up to last week's Apple keynote at WWDC. For a while, iCloud was rumored as being an iTunes streaming service like Pandora, allowing you to listen to your music collection through any iOS device. Those rumors turned out to be untrue so far. iCloud and iTunes Match are only designed to help you sync your iTunes songs across devices, not listen to them remotely. For those whose music collections are too big to fit on an iOS device, Pandora is still one of the main ways to listen to extra music. [via Mashable]
AAPL's top owners have cashed in some stock recently
Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog has an interesting tidbit about Apple's stock lately. A blogger who calls himself Sammy the Walrus IV has been poking around into AAPL records, and has found out that several of Apple's top shareholders have sold some of the stock recently. There's nothing shocking here (nothing outside of the usual buy and sell on the stock exchange), but the numbers are interesting, with firms like Janus Capital and Capital Research investing back into AAPL for over a billion dollars each. Four of the top 10 holders of Apple shares have sold off some this past quarter, including Goldman Sachs, who got rid of 61% of its shares, and these same top 10 holders basically determine the fate of AAPL, as they own around 25% of the company as a whole. Again, these are all routine sales, and as you can see from the chart above, there's still plenty of AAPL buying going on (and we'll even state the obvious: this post should not be considered financial advice). But it's an interesting overview of some of the core firms and shareholders behind the movements of AAPL lately.
How legal are virtual banks and stock exchanges?
A recurring question, amid the forest of what might be legitimate failures and mismanaged enterprises or might just be scams, is just how legal are the banks and stock exchanges that operate alongside and inside various MMOs and Virtual Worlds such as Second Life. As seems to be usual with legal matters, a simple question doesn't yield a simple answer.
WSE issues again
Those of you who are following over from Second Life Insider will know that the Worlds Stock Exchange (WSE) has a long and spotty history. Including being hacked, announcements that criticise the system vanish, there are some odd seeming deals done, and the whole set up is, apparently, questionable at best under Australian Law.The latest part of the saga: Midas Bank has invested a chunk of its money in Hope Capital Bonds and Hope Capital, the owner of WSE has defaulted on payments worth over L$650,000, which is making Midas Bank struggle with a cash flow crisis. Last time we had one of those, Ginko Financial collapsed. Midas Commons, CEO of Midas Bank, proposed a boycott of WSE until such time as their due payments are made - a situation met with some support from other customers in this state. Given the previous history it is little surprise to find there are no announcements about Hope Capital Bonds not paying, but all the Midas Group stocks are suspended with a one line "pending an important announcement" statement. Where will this particular cash flow crisis end up, anyone care to guess?[Via SLReports]
