NYSE cancels erroneous trades of Berkshire Hathaway and other stocks after glitch

The New York Stock Exchange said it would cancel erroneous trades after a technical glitch led to dozens of trading halts for US-listed companies and exchange traded funds.

Class A shares in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway appeared to plunge 99 per cent on Monday morning before a trading pause — which prohibits trading activity in exchange-listed securities at prices outside specified price bands — was initiated.

LSEG data recorded a handful of trades at a price of $185.10 per share, compared with a previous price of $621,484. NYSE said after markets closed on Monday afternoon that all trades at or below $603,718.3 would be cancelled.

Berkshire’s A shares closed on Monday at $631,110, up 0.6 per cent for the day. Berkshire’s B-class shares continued trading as normal throughout the morning.

The exchange’s rules allow traders to claim compensation for “clearly erroneous” trades, and transactions at prices that result from technical glitches have been cancelled in the past. Last year, NYSE was forced to annul thousands of trades after a manual error led hundreds of stocks to begin trading without accurate limit up-limit down bands.

Monday’s trading halts began shortly after the market open, and NYSE said the problem had been resolved and all stocks resumed trading by midday local time.

The exchange blamed “a technical issue with industry-wide price bands published by the [Consolidated Tape Association Security Information Processor]”.

The CTA is an association of major exchanges that manages the dissemination of trading data between different venues. The CTA oversees part of the SIP, which processes and consolidates data.

The CTA said Monday’s problems “may have been related to a new software release” that had been implemented over the weekend. Another part of the SIP led by Nasdaq was not adversely affected.

Other stocks that were affected included restaurant chain Chipotle and Barrick Gold, the mining group. Bloomberg data recorded multiple trades in Barrick Gold at 25 cents per share, compared with $17 per share beforehand. 

The exchange said it was reviewing 40 affected securities for other potentially erroneous NYSE-listed trades.

The majority of securities resumed trading within an hour, though Berkshire’s took longer to resume.

The incident comes just days after a problem with data feeds from index provider S&P Global caused live figures for indices including the S&P 500 to disappear from investors’ screens for about an hour.

The recent trading issues follow a move last week to shorten the window for finalising trades on US exchanges, known in the industry as T+1. However, the person familiar with Monday’s outage said the issue was not linked to that update.

Shares in Intercontinental Exchange, NYSE’s parent group, dipped 0.2 per cent on Monday.