REBOUND ON WALL STREET : Stock Price Quotation System Goes Haywire

Subscribers to the Quotron stock price quotation system really learned the meaning of the word volatile on Monday morning when, for about 30 minutes, the Los Angeles company’s ubiquitous computers couldn’t get the Dow Jones industrial index right.

“It was up 400 and I blinked and . . . it was down 60,” said Sarah A. Stack, a stock market analyst at the Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards brokerage firm in Los Angeles who has a Quotron machine on her desk. “I thought they were real numbers. I was a little perplexed.”

The computer glitch even made nationwide television. Cable News Network broadcast a live news conference during which a New York Stock Exchange spokesman discussed the market’s wild ride but noted that he couldn’t give a figure for the Dow because of Quotron System’s problems.

Quotron Chairman David Hann insisted that individual stock prices and figures on volume were accurate throughout the incident. In addition, he said, many Quotron subscribers calculate the Dow index on their own and don’t rely on Quotron, which is owned by Citicorp, a New York banking firm.

Quotron, the nation’s largest stock quote system with about 100,000 terminals and about 50% of the market, traced the snafu to a “timing problem” in the company’s computer software.

Competitors Automatic Data Processing and Reuters reported brief lags when the Dow, which had lost about 65 points in early trading, bounced back more than 90 points in 15 minutes with heavy volume. But both systems otherwise performed well, the spokesmen said.

“Every quote vendor at one time or another, both in dramatic and undramatic circumstances, has had some kind of problem,” said Robert Crooke, a spokesman for Reuters.

“We don’t talk about the competition,” said Edward Kanarkowski of Automatic Data Processing. But, he added, “I’m so happy that nobody talked about us on national television.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter in New York contributed to this story.