A technical issue caused the temporary halt for some stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange Monday, including at least one whose price briefly fell nearly 100%.
Berkshire Hathaway, the company run by famed investor Warren Buffett, saw its A-class shares plunge 99.97% to $185.10 from Friday's closing price of $627,400, before its trading was halted. After the shares later resumed trading, they immediately recovered all those losses and shot toward $700,000.
Throughout the halt, Berkshire Hathaway's lower-priced B-class shares, which typically trade in concert with the A-class shares, seemed to trade more normally.
The New York Stock Exchange said in a trading update on Monday that trading was halted “in a number of stocks” following a technical issue related to the publication of some pricing data. “Impacted stocks have since reopened (or are in the process of reopening) and the price bands issue has been resolved,” it said shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time.
The exchange did not give a full list of stocks affected, but trading of Berkshire Hathaway's A-class shares was halted at 9:50 a.m. Eastern time, just before the NYSE first said it was investigating a technical issue.
It's not the first glitch to hit Wall Street recently. Last week, S&P Dow Jones Indices said an issue prevented the publication of real-time pricing for its widely followed S&P 500 index for more than an hour during Thursday's late-morning trading.
The industry has just moved to a new system where the settlement of stock trades happen much faster than they used to. Now, most stock trades need to settle in one business day after a deal is made, instead of the prior requirement of two days.
The change was suggested by of the Securities and Exchange Commission suggested after the “meme-stock” craze of early 2021 put an incredible strain on the market's plumbing, which eventually led some brokerages to restrict buying of GameStop and other stocks. That caused much anger among their customers.
