Since the beginning of the week share price quotes for the smaller UK stocks seem to be completely unreliable. Google Finance and Yahoo Finance do not see any trades at all intra-day for some stocks although Yahoo do seem to be working for close-of-day again.
Sites like Moneyam and ADVFN seem to have spent the week firefighting to get some kind of support re-established. But most remarkably, the London Stock Exchange itself is not reporting these trades, so sites like Reuters are quoting an intraday price (presumably from an accurate feed) plus the LSE price which is often days old.
The cause appears to be a change that the LSE have made in the way that off-order-book trades are reported (or not) on their feed, which might be related to the MIFID2 changes due to come in at the start of 2018.
This seems quite scandalous to me. I can't be the only person starting to think that if I can't get accurate timely info about a particular stock then it would not be safe to hold it any longer. I've gone from being able to easily check the price of any stock to not being sure unless I cross-check against a number of sites. It is especially a problem for those of us that download historical prices.
Is anyone else suffering from these problems at the moment?
There's more than a hint of irony in what has happened. The changes have been made to meet the new MiFID II trade reporting obligations, which are intended to standardise the way that all quotes and all trades are publicised to the market to make things fairer for everyone.
However so far for many end-users the effect is to lose all the "O" trades, so we are all currently getting worse info.
Gradually this is being fixed, but it does highlight a problem with services like Google Finance. It's free and in beta and so they can take as long as they like to fix problems, and I do not see any way to report problems to them or to see any reports that they are are aware or working on fixes.
It looks like the LSE tested the changes with the customers of their feed to make sure the switch would go smoothly, but then those customers presumably did not test that their own customers would handle it. So the chain fell down one stage further along.
