Online brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corp. showed customers on its trading platform incorrect prices on certain fixed-income securities for about a week, the latest financial firm to suffer from technology glitches.
A spokesman for Schwab says the firm suffered "technical issues" that affected "a small subset" of fixed-income instruments, including preferred securities and collateralized mortgage obligations. Municipal bonds, which are a big part of the holdings of Schwab clients, were "rarely" impacted, the spokesman added.
The glitch occurred while Schwab integrated a third-party platform that provides pricing information on some bonds and other securities. "In some cases the amounts presented were off by noticeably large sums," said the spokesman. Schwab said the pricing glitches affected some, but not all, fixed-income and preferred securities.
"At no time were there issues related to the actual value of the positions, or of trades," said the Schwab spokesman. "It was a very unfortunate case of displaying the wrong prices to our clients." Clients weren't able to trade on the incorrect prices. The firm didn't make available the number of accounts or securities that have been affected.
Investors using Schwab, which had nine million active brokerage accounts at the end of last month, have been grappling with the incorrect prices for about a week now, according to the spokesman. Logging into Schwab's website until Tuesday gave investors a message warning that "holders of some preferred and fixed income securities may be seeing some incorrect values."
The error message was modified Tuesday, according to one Schwab client, to say "a majority of our technical issues around fixed-income securities pricing values have been resolved." The Schwab spokesman said it has "identified and addressed the underlying problem and the data is now presenting correctly to clients."
In late April, customers were unable to access the Schwab website or log on to their accounts through mobile devices over a small number of days. At the time, the San Francisco company told customers in aTwitter message, "we are experiencing technical issues with our site and mobile app and are working on resolution. We apologize for inconvenience."
A Schwab spokeswoman said that issue had affected all of the company's electronic platforms.
Write to Saabira Chaudhuri at saabira.chaudhuri@wsj.com