Monday, September 29, 2014

Why is a stock's closing price different on different websites?


If RadioShack (RSH) closes above $1 tomorrow, the final day of the month, it will meet the NYSE's requirements for "curing the deficiency" of trading under $1 for too long. But looking at today's closing price, different websites — or even different pages of the same site — have different claims about whether RSH closed above or below $1. Yahoo says it closed at 0.99. Google says it closed at 0.994. And NASDAQ says it closed at 0.9945. So far, all of this is explainable as rounding or truncation. But a different NASDAQ page has a different claim. The big number at the top says it closed at $1, which cannot be achieved by rounding or truncating $0.9945, $0.994 or $0.99. Scroll down to where it says "NASDAQ Official Price" and it says the closing price was actually $1.02. Under "Last Five Real-Time Trades," it shows the final trade was at $1.02. This NYSE page shows $0.99 at the top, but then scroll down to the chart, and it says it closed at $1.02. Then scroll down a bit more, and it says that the close was $0.9945, and that the adjusted close was $0.99.


So why are there all these different closing prices? Why is the "NASDAQ Official Price" for the close three cents higher than the seemingly definitive $0.99 adjusted closing price at the NYSE, where RSH trades, even though the NYSE seems to recognize that the final trade was at $1.02? And is the adjusted closing price really the definitive price? Because the asterisk says it's only "adjusted for splits," suggesting the difference between $0.99 and $0.9945 may only be how many decimal places the column is formatted to contain.







Submitted September 29, 2014 at 08:19PM by canausernamebetoolon http://ift.tt/1mIQ5ND

No comments:

Post a Comment