The exchange, the leading USA platform for buying and selling the stocks of numerous world’s largest companies, resumed trade at about 1910 GMT (3.10am on Thursday Singapore time) after having frozen all equity trading just after 1530 GMT.
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On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 600 points in five minutes.
“If you don’t have all the orders on that marketplace on the close, the pricing on the close would be definitely not accurate”, said Empire Executions Inc President Peter Costa, who trades on the NYSE floor. Earlier Wednesday, United Airlines planes were grounded for several hours due to a system-wide computer crash. The alert also explains that all open orders are being cancelled. President Obama and the Treasury have also said that they are watching what’s going down. “If this happened at (the London Stock Exchange), you would just be sitting staring at a blank screen”. Apart from those brief periods, trading takes place at any of a dozen exchanges and more than 40 private trading venues, known as dark pools.
Nasdaq later agreed to pay a $10 million penalty to settle federal civil charges after regulators said its systems and decisions disrupted the IPO. However, in the long run, the snafu could make it more hard for exchanges to argue against greater oversight from regulators.
Traders wait for trading to resume at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
Market impact: USA markets were already down Wednesday.
Still, the shutdown came at a time of investor insecurity over such issues as Greece’s struggle to avoid economic collapse, plunging stock prices in China, and Puerto Rico’s declaration that it couldn’t continue making payments on its bonds.
As trading on the NYSE halted (the red line), see how technology routed the trading activity to other markets especially the Nasdaq (the blue line).
The Standard & Poor’s 500 gave up 24 points, or 1.2 percent, to 2,057.
CRUDE: Benchmark USA crude was up 35 cents to $52.71 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. And the Nasdaq Composite (INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC) dropped 85.15 points, or 1.7 percent, to 4,912.99.
NYSE quickly sought to assure investors that the halt was “not the result of a cyber breach”.
It’s a far cry from 2000, when NYSE dominated trading of the companies brings to the public market, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba and General Electric.
Despite the big brouhaha over the NYSE’s troubles, to investors, the trading halt on Wall Street may not mean much of anything.
Then, in April 2013, trading in options in Chicago was halted due to an outage caused by software problems.
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Update 12:18pm: The NYSE posted the following two Tweets attributing the outage to a “technical issue”.
