'Some Value' Left in Knight Capital: Analyst (Update 2)

In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Joyce said that the trading problems on Wednesday occurred after "we put in a new bit of software the night before because we were getting ready to trade the NYSE's Retail Liquidity program," and that a "major bug" in the software "sent into the market a ton of orders, all erroneous, so we ended up with a large error position which we had to sort through the balance of the day."

Joyce said that Knight Capital is "very confident in the current operating environment we've reestablished."

When asked about the company's efforts to shore up its capital, Joyce said "it is hard to give anybody a timeline when you are working through it, but we are focused and doing all the work I believe need to be done as we speak. We're kind of pushing ahead and we hope to have the news and then we will share it immediately with our shareholders, our regulators and stakeholders."

KBW analyst Niamh Alexander on Thursday said that "the Board needs to sell this company ASAP in our opinion if it can't get private financing to shore up capital," adding that "there are buyers, this business has attractive assets," and that "continuing independently will be challenging without more capital."

Alexander rates Knight Capital "Market Perform," and lowered her price target for the shares to $4, or less than 50% of an estimated revised tangible book value of $8.50.

According to Alexander, potential acquirers for Knight Capital Group include Goldman Sachs (GS) , Credit Suisse (CS) , and Cantor Fitzgerald, all of which "recently expressed interest to expand into wholesaling organically." The analyst said that KBW would potentially consider JPMorgan Chase (JPM) , Interactive Brokers Group (IBKR) , or Jefferies (JEF) , to be buyers "as they would likely be interested in the trading technology and the retail wholesale network while also potentially eliminating a competitor in the trade execution institutional business."