An apparent glitch at the operator of the New York Stock Exchange triggered volatility trading halts shortly after the open in about a dozen companies, including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Abbott Laboratories.
NYSE said it was having issues pertaining to the limit up-limit down trading bands, which typically govern when stocks are paused for volatility. The sudden disruptions come just days after a glitch last week left the S&P 500 Index without live pricing for an hour, and as the market adapts to quicker settlement times for US stock trades.
“NYSE Equities is currently investigating a reported technical issue,” according to an online status page. “Additional information will follow as soon as possible.” A representative for NYSE declined to comment on the matter beyond the exchange’s market status update page. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.
In addition to the volatility halts, there were at least two trades that went off at prices that seemed erroneous. Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. changed hands at $185.10, adiscount of 99.97% to Friday’s closing price of $627,400. NuScale Power Corp. had a similar glitch, with trades that printed at about 99% below the prior price.
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. Halts are normally triggered by a series of factors, most commonly for rapid and large changes in price and volume. Chipotle resumed trading at 10:21 a.m. in New York and was down about 1.3%.
“A little weird, but almost undoubtedly coincidental,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers LLC, of the NYSE issue after last week’s S&P 500 Index glitch. “We’ve gotten used to huge amounts of uptimes without exchange incidents, so when a couple of glitches in a row occur it is notable. But the amount of data and interconnectedness in the system raises the potential for fragility.”
The glitches come a week after US stock exchanges switched to one-day settlement, and only a few days after a confusing blip caused the S&P 500 to not print updates for about an hour. On Thursday, live pricing stopped for the biggest US equity index as the index provider S&P Dow Jones Indices had trouble disseminating the information, but the glitch did not affect individual stocks and resulted in only minor disruptions.
“Whether a coincidence or not, it is certainly causing a pile of confusion on the street for the second session out of the last three,” Dave Lutz, head of ETFs at JonesTrading, said in a message.
The disruptions hearken back to a confusing episode in January 2023, when a staffer at the New York Stock Exchange’s backup data center in Chicago left a backup system running in an error that led to wild price swings for hundreds of stocks when the market opened.
