An apparent problem at the operator of the New York Stock Exchange triggered a shutdown of volatility trading shortly after the open at a dozen companies, including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Abbott Laboratories.
NYSE said it had problems regarding ascending and descending limit trading bands, which generally govern when stocks are suspended due to volatility. The sudden disruptions come just days after a glitch last week left the S&P 500 index without live prices for an hour, and as the market adjusts to faster settlement times for U.S. stock trades .
“NYSE Equities is currently investigating a reported technical issue,” according to a online status page. “Further information will follow as soon as possible.”
An NYSE representative declined to comment on the matter beyond the exchange’s Market Status Update page. Intercontinental exchange Inc. owns the New York Stock Exchange.
In addition to the volatility stops, at least two trades occurred at prices that appeared to be wrong. Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. changed hands at $185.10, a 99.97% discount from Friday’s closing price of $627,400. NuScale Power Corp. experienced a similar problem, with transactions printing at around 99% below the previous price.
Chipotle was down 1.2% as of 9:44 a.m. New York time when it was halted. Abbott gained as much as 1.9% on Monday. Stops are normally triggered by a series of factors, most often due to rapid and significant 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 definitely a coincidence,” Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers LLC, said of the NYSE issuance after last week’s S&P 500 index glitch. “We’ve become accustomed to huge uptimes with no swap incidents, so when a few issues in a row occur, it’s remarkable. But the amount of data and interconnectivity of the system increase the potential for fragility.
The problems come a week after U.S. stock exchanges moved to one-day settlement, and just days after a confusing incident prevented the S&P 500 from printing updates for about an hour. Live pricing stopped for the largest U.S. stock index, index provider S&P, on Thursday Dow Jones Indices struggled to disseminate information, but the problem did not affect individual stocks and caused only minor disruptions.
“Whether it was a coincidence or not, this is certainly causing a lot of confusion on the Street for the second session out of the last three,” Dave Lutz, head of ETFs at JonesTrading, said in a post.
The disturbances recall a confusing episode of January 2023when an employee at the New York Stock Exchange’s backup data center in Chicago left a backup system running, causing an error that caused wild swings in the prices of hundreds of stocks when the market opened.
