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NYSE fixes problem that showed drops of 99% and caused trading interruptions
(Bloomberg) — A technical error at the New York Stock Exchange resulted in several erroneous volatility trading halts, including for Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Abbott Laboratories, and occasional trades in at least two stocks early in trading Monday. -fair.
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The forced pauses, which began shortly before 9:45 a.m. in New York, were resolved shortly after 11 a.m. and stocks resumed normal trading, according to NYSE statements. The company said a technical issue with “industry-wide” price ranges published by the Consolidated Tape Association Securities Information Processor led to the outages.
In addition to the disruptions in volatility, trading in Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. appeared to be at the wrong prices. About a dozen trades showed shares changing hands at $185.10 at around 9:50 a.m., a 99.97% discount to Friday’s closing price of $627,400. NuScale Power Corp. had a similar failure, with trades that printed about 99% below the previous price.
“It’s very confusing that this is happening to just a few stocks,” said Jonathan Corpina, senior managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners, who typically works the NYSE floor. “I assume these bad negotiations will be broken.”
An NYSE representative declined to comment beyond the exchange’s market status update page. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. owns the New York Stock Exchange.
Up and down limit trading ranges typically govern when stocks are paused due to volatility. The SIP is a single data feed where regulators process and consolidate bids and requests for quotes and trades from all US exchanges. Monday’s sudden outages come just days after a glitch left the S&P 500 index without real-time pricing for an hour, and as the market adapts to faster settlement times for U.S. stock trading .
“A little strange, but almost certainly a coincidence,” Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers LLC, said of the NYSE issuance following last week’s S&P 500 index crash. “We’ve become accustomed to huge amounts of uptime without switching incidents, so when a few failures occur in a row it’s notable.”
Chipotle was down 1.2% at 9:44 a.m. New York time when it was halted. Abbott gained as much as 1.9% on Monday. Stops are typically triggered by a number of factors, most commonly by rapid and large changes in price and volume. Chipotle resumed trading at 10:21 a.m. in New York and was down about 2.5%.
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The crashes come a week after U.S. stock markets switched to one-day settlement, and just days after a confusing signal caused the S&P 500 to not publish updates for about an hour. On Thursday, real-time prices stopped for the largest U.S. stock index as index provider S&P Dow Jones Indices had trouble releasing the information, but the glitch did not affect individual stocks and resulted only in small disturbances.
“Whether it’s a coincidence or not, it’s certainly causing a lot of confusion on the streets for the second session of the last three,” Dave Lutz, head of ETFs at JonesTrading, said in a message.
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The outages are reminiscent of a confusing episode from January 2023, when an employee at the New York Stock Exchange’s backup data center in Chicago left a backup system running with an error that led to wild price swings for hundreds of stocks when the market opened.
–With assistance from Carly Wanna and Jessica Menton.
(Updates to add additional details and comments.)
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