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Wednesday has been a day Nasdaq officials would soon like to forget.
For starters, it was the only U.S. index to fall on a day when most stocks performed reasonably well. Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) latest pullback dragged the entire Nasdaq down – 0.4% as of 3 p.m. eastern. The S&P 500 (+0.5%) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (+1%) were both up.
Earlier in the day, Nasdaq suffered the embarrassment of yet another IPO mishap when the debut of business-development company WhiteHorse Finance was postponed due to a “human error” by a Nasdaq employee. WhiteHorse’s initial public offering was supposed to launch on the Nasdaq at 11 a.m. today but was pushed back several minutes before ultimately being postponed until further notice.
WhiteHorse’s botched IPO conjures up memories of Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) IPO, which Nasdaq bungled in its May 18 debut due to a technical glitch.
If that wasn’t enough, the Nasdaq is also taking heat for upgrading Facebook to its hallowed Nasdaq-100 list, comprised of the largest domestic and international non-financial securities listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Facebook, in just its seventh month as a publicly traded company, is replacing Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY), a world-renowned outsourcing firm that’s been in business for more than 30 years.
So this wasn’t the best day in what has already been a tough stretch for the tech-heavy index. Nasdaq stocks have fallen 2.4% in the last three months, while both the S&P 500 and the Dow have made slight gains.