(
)
And we thought the robots were the problem.
Turns out that the humans can be just as bumbling as the computers at Nasdaq.
The electronic exchange run by CEO Robert Greifeld was forced yesterday to cancel orders on a planned $100 million initial public offering of WhiteHorse Finance due to “human error,” a Nasdaq spokesman said.
A staffer in the exchange’s market-watch department “inadvertently” pressed a button to cancel trading rather than to delay the launch of the company.
Nasdaq’s second IPO screw-up — its missteps during Facebook’s May debut cost firms tens of millions of dollars — comes during a rocky several months for Wall Street’s equity markets.
The missteps, mostly tied to computer glitches, have shaken the confidence of Main Street investors.
WhiteHorse — which provides small-business loans — was originally scheduled to debut at about 11 a.m. The IPO, however, was then pushed back to the afternoon.
But instead of pressing a button that would have delayed the offering, an employee hit a cancel button, the spokesman said.
It’s unclear what caused the original delay.
WhiteHorse’s IPO eventually came off at 3 p.m., priced at $15 a share. But the stock dropped in its only hour of trading, closing down 7.3 percent at $13.90.
The botched debut differs from Facebook’s bungled IPO, which was sparked by a faulty computer algorithm.
The status of the employee behind the current fiasco, who works in an area that oversees the exchange’s traded stocks, could not be determined.
Back in March, the BATS exchange was forced to shutter plans to offer its stock on its own exchange due to a computer problem.
And broker-dealer Knight Capital was hit in August with a $470 million loss when a bad program in its trading system spiraled out of control and bankrupted the company run by CEO Tom Joyce.
Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Barclays served as underwriters on WhiteHorse’s IPO.