You Can See Workday's Trading Halts in the Tape

At 18:36 UTC on August 13, 2026, Reuters reported that Silver Lake is in talks to acquire Workday. What our tape recorded over the following thirteen minutes is a clean, minute-by-minute picture of a stock repricing around a takeover report — including the moments when it was not trading at all.

The tape, minute by minute

The rows with zero volume and an unchanged price are the interesting ones. A stock that is merely quiet still trades occasionally; a stock showing four consecutive minutes at exactly $200.04 with not a single share crossing is a stock that has been stopped.

What a volatility halt is, and why the price gaps

US exchanges pause trading in a security when its price moves too far too fast within a short window. The mechanism exists because a violent move is often the market discovering a price rather than agreeing on one, and a brief pause lets orders accumulate on both sides instead of a thin book being run over.

That is why the price gaps rather than climbs. During the pause nothing trades, so there are no intermediate prints between $200.04 and $220.50. The twenty-dollar difference is not a move that happened quickly — it is a move that happened invisibly, resolved in the auction that reopens the stock. Anyone watching a normal chart sees a vertical line and no explanation. In the underlying bars the explanation is plain: the flat, volume-free stretch immediately before it.

Two such stretches appear in this window, which matches contemporaneous reporting that trading was halted multiple times. Volume across the fifteen-minute window ran at 47 times its normal level for that period.

Why our one-minute reading is 0.00%

The reaction table on this page reports a one-minute move of 0.00% and a fifteen-minute move of 18.38%. On a stock that rose eighteen percent, a flat first minute looks like a data error. It is not, and the reason is the same as everything above.

One minute after the headline crossed, at 18:37, Workday was still marked at $186.27 and not a single share had traded. The first print came at 18:38. A one-minute reading of zero here does not mean the market shrugged; it means the market had not yet been allowed to answer.

This is worth knowing generally. A short-window reaction measurement assumes the security is trading, and on the most violent headlines — precisely the ones most worth measuring — that assumption is the first thing to break. When a one-minute figure is flat and the fifteen-minute figure is large, check whether the instrument was halted before concluding the initial reaction was muted.

Two different percentages, two different baselines

These are not competing numbers and neither is wrong. Our measurement asks what the headline did, so it starts at the last price before the headline crossed. A session figure asks what the day did, so it starts at yesterday's close. When a stock has already moved before the news lands, the two answers differ.

The other detail that matters: $220.50 was not where it finished. The shares closed at $206.45, meaningfully below the post-halt print. The first price after a takeover report is an early estimate made by whoever is willing to trade in the first minutes, and it is routinely revised.

Why Workday was a target

The report describes a company with a market value around $43 billion whose shares had fallen roughly 15% this year and more than 40% from their 2024 peak. Reuters attributes that decline to investors questioning the durability of traditional software in an era of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence.

That concern is the entire setup. Workday sells human-resources and financial management software — large, long-lived systems that companies buy on multi-year contracts. The bear case is not that customers are leaving; it is that AI could change what such systems are worth over a decade, and public markets have marked the stock down for a risk that will take years to resolve either way.

A private buyer sees the same uncertainty differently. Silver Lake is not answerable to a quarterly share price, so a long, expensive adaptation is easier to fund away from public markets. Buying an established revenue base at a 40%-off valuation is a coherent proposition precisely because the public market is unsure.

Scale is the obstacle. At about $43 billion this would rank among the largest software buyouts ever, and Reuters reports Silver Lake could bring in additional investors to finance it — the firm's prior Electronic Arts take-private ran to $55 billion. Talks have been held in recent months and are ongoing, with no guarantee of a deal. Nothing has been agreed, which is worth restating plainly against a stock that moved 18% in eight minutes.