Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Warren Buffet Breaks NASDAQ

 According to the Wall St Journal, the NASDAQ computer systems can only handle stock prices less than $429,496.7295 per share.  Warren Buffet's share price has climbed to $421,000, close to the limit.  With a little more good luck on Warren's part, NASDAQ will no longer be able to trade his stock.  The magic number of NASDAQ's limit is otherwise known as 2 raised to the 32nd power.  Which says the software guys chose to store stock prices as 4 byte integers back when they wrote NASDAQ's software.  Far as I am concerned a couple of hundred dollars a share is a perfectly reasonable share price.  All of my stocks are $50-100-200 a share.  So going with a 32 bit integer and a max share price of a little less than half a mil per share was, and still is, a perfectly reasonable design decision.  

The WSJ article goes on to say that NASDAQ is considering rewriting all their software to support Warren's fantastic share price.  That's Wall St weenies for you.  Me, I would tell Warren to do a stock split if he wants to continue trading on NASDAQ.

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