In what’s been an unusual day for high-profile tech glitches, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading late Wednesday morning.
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“It’s not a big event, it’s a matter of flipping the switch and hoping the circuit doesn’t blow”, Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities Ltd.in Toronto, said by phone.
“It is the most significant outage since Nasdaq’s blackout [in 2013]”, says Eric Scott Hunsader, a market structure expert and CEO of Nanex, a data feed company.
All the 10 major S&P 500 sectors were lower, with the telecommunications index down 1.6%.
“We’re experiencing a technical issue that we’re working to resolve as quickly as possible”, the NYSE said in a statement.
Probably not. Stocks were already down Wednesday because of investor concerns about China’s plunging stock market and the ongoing Greece debt saga. NYSE-listed securities continue to trade unaffected on other market centers, according to their Twitter page. Hopes that Greece will eventually submit a proposal and spur talks that will lead to a deal helped stop the recent European drop.
“This is one of the rare cases where the fragmented markets we live in actually serve a objective”, said Dave Nadig, director of exchange-traded funds at FactSet Research Systems.
Technical issues are being blamed for NYSE trading to shut down at 11:32 a.m. ET. It also did not affect the NYSE’s two other trading platforms, Amex Options and Arca Options. The average twelve-month target price among brokerages that have issued a report on the stock in the previous year is $253.38. More than $3 trillion in company values had evaporated. The New York Times reported just before noon that the scale of the outage has “little precedent”.
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ASIA’S DAY: Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 3 percent, and South Korea’s Kospi lost 1.2 percent.
