Nanex Research

Nanex ~ 18-May-2012 ~ LinkedIn IPO

Note: The facebook IPO page has moved.

The IPO in LinkedIn Corporation (LNKD took place on 19-May-2011. Between 09:31:50 and 09:58:21, the bid and offer on NYSE (the only one quoting at that time) climbed from 65.00/70.00 to 81.00/83.00. At 10:00:42, the first trade executed against NYSE's $83.00 offer.

The first 4 charts are 1 second interval charts of LNKD showing the first 16 minutes of quotes and trades.

Chart 1. NBBO (National Best Bid or Offer) Spread. Black: bid < ask (normal), Yellow: bid = ask (locked), Red: bid > ask (crossed)

Chart 2. Best bids and offers (NBBO) color coded by exchange.

Chart 3. All bids and offers color coded by exchange.
Note the many quotes far outside the NBBO. In fact we left out 2 quotes because scaling them in would have flattened the chart. Both of these extremely wide quotes were from Nasdaq: the first had an ask price of $199,999.98 (look familiar?), and the second had an ask price of $108.36.  If a system glitch caused a trade to incorrectly route to one of the wide quotes, it would have halted the stock, or worse

Chart 4. All trades color coded by exchange.


The next chart shows prices of SPY which is a good proxy for the state of the U.S. equity market.


Chart 5. SPY 1 minute OHLC.
The red line shows the open, high, low and closeing prices between 10:00 and 10:01, when LNKD began trading. There was a news related violent price drop during the first few seconds after 10:00:00.




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