Clumsy man throws almighty spanner in Nasdaq's works

NEWS Nasdaq is still desperately trying to recover from a computer glitch which led to the shares of a whole host of companies being incorrectly priced at the end of last week. It was the most serious systems breakdown to hit the high-tech stock exchange in nearly a decade. The share prices of 35 companies are known to have been affected, but further investigations will continue today. One company, Persistence Software, was given a closing price of five cents on Friday when it should have been 48 cents. According to today's FT, the glitch was caused by a WorldCom employee who was working at Nasdaq's main data centre. Apparently he entered a "mistaken computer command".