Trading Outage Amid Euronext Failure: Goldman Sachs Group

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s European dark pool suffered from Euronext NV's connectivity problem, resulting no trading at the open today.

The bank’s Euronext’s Smartpool  and Sigma X dark venue after first 75 minutes of European trading. According to the company, Sigma X, which is a multilateral facility, opened at 9:15 a.m. London time on the other hand, Smartpool resumed trading at 9:45 a.m.Amsterdam-based Euronext accepted that the connection between traders and the platform was disconnected.

According to the bank, Goldman Sachs’s Sigma X dark pool uses Euronext Market Solutions technology hosted in the exchange operator’s data center.

Alasdair Haynes, former chief executive officer of Chi-X Europe Ltd.,founder of subscription-based Aquis Exchange Ltd said,“Every single technology company will have technology problems at some point in time.” He added, “It’s how you mitigate those risks.”

Goldman’s dark pool has accounted for 0.5 percent of European equity-trading market share until now and Bats data show that Smartpool made up just 0.03 percent.

Euronext has equity markets in  France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman, said “the technical issue has now been resolved and Sigma X MTF is operating as normal.”

BlackBerry Revenue Miss,shares plunged 5.6 percent to $9.51 at 9:54 a.m. New York time

BlackBerry Ltd. published fiscal third-quarter revenue that seems to slide well short of analysts’ estimates, fading the company’s praiseworthy achievement of generating cash earlier than promised. It's revenue dropped 34 percent to $793 million in the three months ended Nov. 29, that's a miss in analysts’ estimates for $931 million. BlackBerry shares plunged 5.6 percent to $9.51 at 9:54 a.m. New York time. Before this there was a drop of  9.6 percent for the biggest intraday drop since July.

Chief Executive Officer John Chen said that company's revenue in the quarter was “not satisfying” and that he needs another couple of quarters before sales will rise. “Now we’ll turn our attention to revenue,” he said.

As Chen's command and working style got it's way in the company, BlackBerry generated positive cash flow of $43 million, a quarter earlier than promised. It even posted an adjusted profit of 1 cent a share. Now. Chen's goals were to reach break-even cash flow by the end of this fiscal year and then return to sustainable profit and revenue growth next year.

An analyst with BGC partners in NY,Colin Gillis said while the stock is down today because of the revenue miss, it not necessary that company won't reach positive cash-flow.

Chen has focused on making software and providing security for governments and corporations and along with that the company is also introducing new phones that focus business users, like the Passport and the Classic, which was introduced on Wednesday. Chen said today that orders for the Classic are higher than orders were for the Passport at the start.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company recognized revenue on about 2 million smartphones, down from 2.1 million in the second quarter. It was the first quarter that customers could buy the square-screened Passport, which debuted in September. The week the phone was introduced, Chen said the company had pre-sold 200,000 Passports.Chen said today that orders for the Classic are higher than orders were for the Passport at the start.

The company has a net loss of $148 million, or 28 cents a share. A year earlier it had a loss of $4.4 billion, or $8.37 a share. At the end of the quarter it has $3.1 billion in cash and equivalents.  Even thought analyst were expecting 5 cent a share loss, the company has earnings of 1 cent a share, excluding some items, the first adjusted profit in seven quarters.

With oil, Dow, Nasdaq and S&P are down.

Crude prices are lowest in more than five years. Now it's below $58 a barrel.

The Dow had a toughest weekly performance in more than three years. It faced a 3.8% loss with 3000 points this week.The S&P 500 also faced a tough week. It was down more than 3.5% for the week, biggest drop since May 2012.  The Nasdaq got a 2.7% drop.


All analysts  and investors are searching answer of:

is this a pullback of 10% from recent highs?

Even though market volatility has returned in the second half of the year, investors seem to be scared again. The market started to slide down from mid-September through mid-October before staging a sharp rebound. It fostered the Dow to hit a new all-time high just a week ago due to strong U.S. jobs report.

Still, many investors were predicting that the Dow would soon top 18,000 for the first time. And with the course of events, there was a sharp sell-off in oil and it changed everything. Crude prices are lowest in more than five years. Now it's below $58 a barrel. This initiated slide in energy stocks.
Not only oil other stocks also went down. Verizon (VZ, Tech30) fell 1% Friday and is now down 6% this week. Smaller telcos Windstream (WIN) and Frontier (FTR) were laggards in the S&P 500.

In a greater perspective, phenomenon of depletion on the oil price is spreading in other sector too. Yet, investors are still searching for silver lining in the market.