Why do systems like Nasdaq and YouTube have trouble handling large values?
, Berkshire Hathaway’s boss, rejected this idea, saying that it might result in “an awful lot of people buying it who didn’t have the faintest idea what they were doing”. Now his stance has had an unintended consequence. The recent stockmarket rally has pushed Berkshire Hathaway’s “Class A” shares so high that they have threatened to break the pricing and reporting system of the Nasdaq stock exchange.
It’s all about the bits. Computers use binary digits, or bits, that can store 0 or 1 as a potential value, grouped typically into units of eight digits. An eight-digit binary number, which can represent values from 0 to 255, is called a byte. Larger numbers are represented using multiple bytes. Two bytes can represent numbers from 0 to 65,535; four bytes can represent numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295; and so on.
Nasdaq’s pricing system relies for price quotations on 32-bit integers. Nobody conceived that a share price might exceed $429,496.7295, as Berkshire Hathaway’s has. This assumption seemed reasonable: only in recent years has Berkshire Hathaway flown so close to the value. The share price of NVR Inc, a construction-and-mortgage company that comes second to Berkshire Hathaway among public companies for sticker shock, is not far above $5,000. But now it is causing trouble.
Nasdaq isn’t the first system to struggle with this problem. Players of “Final Fantasy 7”, a video game from 1997, could cause the game to glitch by registering a score so high that it overflowed the 32-bit number used to store it. In 2014 “Gangnam Style”, a music video by Psy, a Korean pop star,. YouTube’s system kept one bit in reserve for a positive or negative sign, halving the maximum value it could handle compared with Nasdaq.
Nasdaq says it will have a fix in place by May 17th for its pricing feeds. Changes typically involve “refactoring” code, or rewriting existing software to give it newer capabilities, such as using a 64-bit number instead.
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