SUSIE GHARIB, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT ANCHOR: Fresh signs that the housing market is still struggling as new home sales fall for a second straight month. Meanwhile, Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) comes up with a way to keep foreclosure victims in their homes.

SHARI OLEFSON, AUTHOR, "FORECLOSURE NATION": This program is not going far enough yet, 1,000 people is not enough, but we`ve got to make sure it works first.

TOM HUDSON, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT ANCHOR: And on Wall Street, trading in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares goes haywire as a bad trade triggers a circuit breaker. It comes as the regulators take a closer look at computerized high frequency trading. It`s NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT for Friday, March 23rd.

Good evening, and thanks for joining us. A strange day on Wall Street, Susie, a stock exchange that is not a household name tripped up trading in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares and then even stopped its own initial public offering.

GHARIB: Tom, it was a nasty chain of events. The exchange is called BATS. That stands for Better Alternative Trading System. It`s based far away from Wall Street in a suburb of Kansas City.

Now it`s an all-electronic exchange accounting for more than 10 percent of all stock trades. Today the exchange itself was hoping to sell its stock to the public for the first time, but it got off to a very rough start.

HUDSON: Yes, as its own stock was beginning to trade, it was halted after just 15 seconds when prices plunged to zero. All the trades were canceled, the exchange then withdrew its initial public offering.

And then at the same time, trading in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock was stopped for five minutes during the session because of bad trades made on BATS`s own stock exchange. Those bad trades were eventually cancelled in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) after triggering rules that were put in place after the flash crash almost two years ago.

One of the contributing factors of that astonishing drop of nearly 1,000 points by the Dow Jones Industrial Average remains under scrutiny by the government`s stock cops. The Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly is conducting a broad investigation into high tech, sophisticated trading platforms linked directly to stock exchanges.

The traditional trading floors seem quaint when compared to what`s called high frequency trading. That`s complex computer software designed to buy and sell stocks in fractions of a second, and often times the computers are hooked up straight to exchanges, like BATS and DirectEdge from New Jersey.

Larry Tabb runs trading advisory firm The Tabb Group. He`s with us from Boston tonight.

Larry, quite a trifecta for this exchange, the BATS exchange. Does it show the fragility of stock trading in the U.S.?

LARRY TABB, FOUNDER & CEO, THE TABB GROUP: Actually, I think (INAUDIBLE) shows the opposite. I think it shows the resiliency. Right now there are 13 equity exchanges. If one goes down, generally the others can transition in a heartbeat, actually quicker than a heartbeat.

Now that didn`t help...