The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has blamed an issue with the Consolidated Tape System (CTS) data stream after a glitch this morning that briefly and erroneously showed a 99.9% drop in the price of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway A-shares among other trading oddities.
“A technical issue with industry-wide price bands published by the CTA SIP triggered halts in a number of stocks listed on the NYSE Group exchanges this morning. Impacted stocks have since reopened (or are in the process of reopening) and the price bands issue has been resolved” said the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)-group owned NYSE today.
The CTA said that the incident may have been due to a new software release (quelle surprise). In a short update it said: “Today between 9:30 a.m. and 10:27 a.m., CTA experienced an issue with Limit Up/Limit Down price bands that may have been related to a new software release.
“To resolve the issue, CTA failed over to the secondary data center, which is operating on the previous version of the software. The following symbols that were subject to trading pauses on CTA between 9:30 a.m. and 10:27 a.m. were potentially impacted by erroneous price bands due to this software release. CTA is restoring the previous version of the software in the primary data center and will be running out of the primary data center on Tuesday, June 4, 2024.”
SIP refers to Securities Information Processors (SIPs); entities that consolidate bid/ask quotes and trades from exchanges into a data feed.
The US has two primary SIPs: the CTA, which oversees the SIP for NYSE listed securities and the UTP, which does the same for Nasdaq listed securities. (The SEC is working on a major CT overhaul, but that’s another story.)
Investors who tried to capitalise on the opportunity to buy Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares at a wild discount due to the software glitch will be unlikely to keep their shares even if they got their orders filled, trading firm experts say. Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, told MarketWatch that the trades won't hold due to the exchange's policy on clearly erroneous transactions.
"These are definitely going to be busted," Saluzzi told MarketWatch: "They are so far away from the mark."
