失败后的IPO，何时应该再试一次？

周五，堪萨斯州堪萨斯州的交易所运营商蝙蝠全球市场的首次公开发售 - 已在几秒钟内取消了一年以上的仔细准备。现在的问题是：蝙蝠什么时候会再试一次？

What should have been a triumphant moment for CEO Joe Ratterman, 45, quickly turned into a nightmare. At 10:45am, one of the Lenexa, Kanas-based exchange operator’s 32 matching engines encountered a glitch in the computer code related to the launch of trading in the company’s own stock, which had priced at $16.00 a share the day before, March 22. When the stock opened at $15.25 on March 23, BATS appeared to have started trading successfully. But the software bug immediately began to interfere with the exchange’s messaging system, preventing prices from being continuously updated — and wreaking havoc with BATS’ new issuance.

Unrelated stock symbols, from A through BFZZZ, were also affected. Apple’s stock, AAPL, was caught up in the confusion when a single trade for 100 shares on a BATS venue caused the price to drop more than 9 percent to $542.80, setting off a circuit breaker that suspended all trading in the stock nationwide for five minutes. Ratterman, who was watching the crisis unfold over the shoulders of his trade desk managers, was stunned. “I think a lot of stomachs sank,” he says. “I know mine did.”

Within ten seconds of detecting the problem, BATS’ software engineers had sprung into action, Ratterman says, halting trading of BATS’ shares and scrambling to isolate the coding error in the system. But the damage was done. Although the team pinned down and patched the software glitch in two-and-a-half hours, company executives — who had initially announced that trading in BATS shares would resume at 1:15pm — decided to pull the IPO after consulting with its underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley. All erroneous trade executions for the day were broken. BATS’ IPO, which had been designed to put NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OMX on notice that their powerful duopoly in company listings faced a new challenger, had failed.

虽然蝙蝠的核心贸易业务不太可能受其拙劣的首次公开募股影响，但其公共市场故障无法在较差的时间内令监管机构对电子交易中的技术问题的敏感性令人敏感。没有人忘记了“闪存崩溃“2010年5月6日，他从道琼斯工业平均值的大约1,000点以分钟为单位。虽然蝙蝠编码错误的辐射是良好的，但公司无法在其自身股份落成交易之前确定问题 - 尽管有几个月的严格测试 - 可能会吸引监管机构的利益。在当天本身，Ratterman表示，他的团队在几分钟内向证券交易委员会达成了向证券和交换委员会提醒他们对蝙蝠正在经历影响其主要市场的技术问题的事实提醒他们。

蝙蝠IPO博物的讽刺是，小组和欧洲几乎所有的主要交流都偶尔会遭受交易和中断的不便，并刺激他们的客户，但很少有人越来越多的公众审查。在伦敦证券交易所集团迁移到由其子公司千禧年的新软件平台迁移到一年的新软件平台之后，最后一年二十年前发生了最后一年多的高调危机。勉强两周后，整个系统崩溃，暂停了LSE的所有交易近四个小时。

“Trading glitches aren’t that unusual — it is part of the way that the markets operate and there is no such thing as a foolproof system,” says Richard Perrott, a London-based analyst who covers diversified financials for Hamburg-based Berenberg Bank. “The incumbent exchanges don’t have 100 percent track records. BATS was unlucky to get hit on a day by a failure in its own stock, when the problems were extremely visible.”

蝙蝠心甘情愿地进入聚光灯。The company’s decision to list its shares on its own exchange was a gutsy move, intended to open a new frontier in the battle between a generation of fast, techno-centric exchange operators like BATS and older, more established incumbents, like NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OMX. The team at BATS knew that they were making a high-profile public statement by designing and launching a listings service, which was a technical risk — none of them had run a listings service before. But moving into listings seemed like a natural next step for Ratterman and his team, who favor faster, cheaper, more efficient trading systems. Company listings in the U.S., which remain firmly under the purview of NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OMX, are still fee-rich services that have not seen much competition.

BATS traces its scrappy, competitive corporate ethos directly back to its founder and inaugural CEO, Dave Cummings, chairman of Kansas City, Missouri-based automated trading firm Tradebot Systems. Had BATS' IPO gone ahead, Cummings, who is a member of BATS’ board of directors, would have held 2.92 million shares through his wholly-owned investment vehicle Tradebot Ventures Fund — a stake that would have been worth a tidy $44.5 million at BATS’ opening auction price of $15.25 per share. (By comparison, Ratterman’s 405,962 shares would have been worth about $6.2 million.) The outspoken Cummings started the business in 2005 with 12 employees, including Ratterman, most of whom had come from his existing team at Tradebot. Frustrated by the pricing power of the dominant exchanges, Cummings set out to create a rival trading platform that could challenge the incumbents for market share by offering banks, broker-dealers and high-frequency trading firms lightning-quick, low-cost trade execution. Barely six months after the company’s founding, BATS launched its inaugural trading platform in January 2006.

Since its inception, BATS has grown rapidly. The company now operates two U.S. stock exchanges, its primary market BATS BZX Exchange and a secondary market, BATS BYX Exchange, as well as an equity options market, BATS Options. In the U.S., BATS has won combined market share of 11 percent in domestic equities based on February’s monthly trading volumes; its options market has gained market share of 2.8 percent. The exchange operator also has an established presence in Europe, having launched a European equity-trading platform, BATS Europe, in 2008. Last February, BATS made a bid for its larger rival, Chi-X Europe, and closed the deal in November. The new business, known as BATS Chi-X Europe, has a combined market share in European equities of 25.3 percent as of February, based on the value of shares traded.

尽管其核心交易业务不太可能be affected by its botched IPO, BATS will now have to decide when and if it wants to risk another IPO attempt. Ratterman won’t be drawn on the issue, saying simply that it is a decision that will be made through ongoing discussions between management and the board. Those conversations “will start this week and carry on,” he says. “We’ve got some work to do and we need to retrench.”

在他的电子邮件中，卡明斯秃头表达了他的意见，即蝙蝠应该制定一个计划在第二季度公开，如果可能的话，并“迁移过去的问题”失败的IPO。意见仍然在分析师社区分开。Berenberg的Richard Perrott认为，蝙蝠应该努力努力捍卫其在美国股票的市场份额，培养其选择业务，并在重新启动IPO之前完成Chi-X Europe的整合。“他们可能需要在他们开始重新思考投资者之前要做所有这些。

But Adam Honoré, research director at Boston-based advisory firm Aite Group feels that the company ought to waste no time before making another attempt. “It would be ludicrous for them to hold out on this,” he says. “You fix your system issues, you do some adequate testing and you get back out there.”

他指出，唯一的物质影响到交易困境，将在蝙蝠'股价。“他们不会获得16美元的份额，”他补充道，“但这是他们得到的惩罚。”