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The London Stock Exchange is back to normal after a software glitch on Monday halted trading for the longest period in eight years.

"It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn't have foreseen," an exchange representative told Reuters on Tuesday.

The outage began about 45 minutes after trading opened on Monday and lasted more than seven hours--effectively wiping a full day's trading from the books.

A representative told Silicon.com that the exchange, which switched to its digital trading platform TradElect in June 2007, has been running normally since the fix was put … Read more

Technology investment funds are taking a beating, ranking nearly dead last among more than a dozen categories of domestic stock funds tracked by mutual research company Morningstar.

But even though all of the 75 specialty technology funds listed by Morningstar are down year-to-date, some of the portfolio managers have found ways to minimize the carnage, which has seen the category pushed into the red by an average of 19.16 percent as of Friday.

Within tech funds, an index approach has proved to be a more successful strategy in this current climate, as evidenced by the North Track NYSE Arca Tech 100 Index Funds.. … Read more

The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the best stock ideas from the Cake communuty.

Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, "a lot is wasted." He's built a service that identifies the stock picks from the best performing members in his community, and lets other users take advantage of their investing skills. Importantly, Cake doesn't show you just which stocks have done well … Read more

Paul Kedrosky notices an impressive feat for Microsoft: for the first time in a long time, its stock has outperformed Google's this week, this month, and this year.

Granted, this is like calling Microsoft the sexiest nun in the convent, given how poor its performance has been, but it's also an indication that Microsoft may have more life in it than widely assumed.

Former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen has settled with the SEC over charges that she improperly backdated stock options at the company.

The SEC filed a lawsuit against Heinen last year charging her with cherry-picking grant dates for stock option awards to Apple executives--including CEO Steve Jobs--and falsifying paperwork in order to cover up the selection of the favorable dates. Stock option backdating is legal if properly disclosed, but dozens of companies--including CNET Networks--in the earlier part of this decade failed to do so, and executives at other companies have gone to prison as a result.

Heinen will pay $2.… Read more

On Monday we heard that Facebook was allowing current employees to sell a delineated portion of their common stock, something that the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Now, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon, who also originally reported the Facebook tidbit, says that LinkedIn employees are going to have the option of doing the same. The business social network, Eldon wrote, is allowing current employees to sell 20 percent of their equity in the company at a $500 million valuation. That's quite a bit lower than the billion-dollar valuation reportedly bestowed upon the company after its recent $53 million Series D funding … Read more

If you see an increase in the number of 20-somethings driving nice cars around Palo Alto any time soon, maybe this is why: VentureBeat reported Monday that Facebook is ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company's internal valuation of $4 billion. It's slated to start this fall. For early employees of the company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room, this could mean some legit cash.

Facebook's valuation was reported at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last year, but the company has backtracked on … Read more

Shares of Nortel Networks sank as much as 17 percent on Friday after the company reported a wider second-quarter loss and warned that it faces challenges ahead.

The Canadian telecommunications equipment company posted a quarterly loss of $113 million, or 23 cents a share. That compares with a loss of $37 million, or 7 cents, a year ago. The results included $67 million in restructuring charges.

The company also warned that it faces increasing challenges amid concerns about the economy and lower spending by certain North American CDMA customers. But it asserted that revenue is expected to grow in the … Read more

The world of finance is sober, serious business, ever more so in a struggling through economy. Bloomberg's freeware application for the iPhone and iPod Touch gives information-seekers a clear view of the moment with financial headlines, a ticker finder, and a fleshed-out index of world markets.

An appealing dark-themed application, Bloomberg contains a read-only newsfeed and statistics on various exchanges in global markets. Highs, lows, and a graph of yearlong performance are displayed for each exchange--further charts and tables are available for industry and stock movers.

To discover individual stock performance, users simply enter the company name into the … Read more