Berkshire hathaway share price: Berkshire Hathaway Class A share price too high for Nasdaq to handle

Warren Buffett-led Berkshire Hathaway, whose Class A share last quoted at a jaw-dropping $4,37,131 level, may push Nasdaq exchange to soon upgrade its computer system.

Earlier this week Nasdaq Inc. temporarily suspended broadcasting prices for Class A shares of Berkshire over several popular data feeds on Tuesday, a Wall Street Journal report suggested, noting that such feeds provide real-time price updates to a number of online brokerages and finance websites.

The WSJ suggested that Nasdaq would upgrade its computer system on May 17, 2021 in order to allow share price more than $429,496.7295 appear on the computer system.

Nasdaq is rushing to finish an upgrade later this month that would fix the problem, it said.

The stock rose $2011 or, 0.46 per cent, on Friday.

The WSJ article noted that Nasdaq and some other market operators record stock prices in a compact computer format that uses 32 bits, or ones and zeros.

The biggest number possible is two to the 32nd power minus one, or 4,294,967,295. Stock prices are frequently stored using four decimal places, so the highest possible price is $429,496.7295, it reported.

In an alert to clients on Monday, Nasdaq said it would finish an upgrade of its data feeds on May 17 to allow stock prices greater than $429,496.7295. Until then, however, the exchange said it would temporarily suspend publishing the price of any stock that exceeds 98 per cent of the threshold, WSJ noted.