Yesterday’s trading session was a mess on the New York Stock Exchange.
More than 250 companies – incl blue chips Such as Walmart, ExxonMobil, McDonald’s, Verizon and AT&T – they were halted from trading after the New York Stock Exchange ran into what it called a “systems problem”.
The outage prevented the auction from opening on these shares, which led to widespread trading halts and doubts among investors about whether the orders were registered or not.
New York Stock Exchange trading starts at 9:30 am. Prior to that, the opening price is determined based on thousands of buy and sell orders placed throughout the night and early morning. The exchange collects these orders and sets the opening price based on supply and demand.
Problem: Yesterday morning, the auctions for some of the stocks were not opened because a “glitch” in the system prevented some orders from being collected. The result: brutal price distortion.
With an artificial imbalance between supply and demand, prices traded at levels a far cry from what stocks closed the day before.
Some stocks have lost billions of dollars market cap in a few seconds.
Wal-Mart, for example, lost $46 billion in market value (one ETA), while Wells Fargo was down 15% and Morgan Stanley down 12%.
The NYSE said some of yesterday’s transactions would be deemed “invalid and corrected.”
“Events like this are extremely rare and we are taking a deep look at today’s activity to ensure a higher level of resilience in our systems,” the exchange said.
Throughout the day, a market spreadsheet was shared showing 251 stocks affected by the issue.
The New York Stock Exchange said that yesterday’s close was as normal as today’s opening.
The magnitude of the effect is still unclear however merchants It was estimated that the hole was deep.
“What appears to have happened is a technical issue that caused all of my opening orders to be cancelled, even though some of them should have been completed.” merchant to Reuters. “They already fixed that, but that would be a huge mess for them to clean up.”
Another investor said the cost to brokers and retail investors is likely to be in the high eight figures.
Another investor said: “This is a huge flaw, there is no one to hide it.” “Surely there are people who are losing money and they are not happy.”
Peter Arbex