The video here shows 10 seconds of trading in BlackBerry shares yesterday, slowed down more than 20-fold to show one flurry of activity down to the thousandth of a second. It was compiled by Nanex, a provider of financial data products, to show the surge that came yesterday afternoon when the market realized BlackBerry might have suitors other than Prem Watsa’s Fairfax. The video shows that at some points the NASDAQ was fielding 40,000 quotes per second.
When word got out yesterday that Cerberus Capital may be weighing a bid for BlackBerry, traders furiously bid up the stock from US$7.60 to more than $8. This screengrab from Google Finance shows the spike just before 1 p.m. — the top line is the price and the bars a the bottom show volume.
