NYSE Says Strange Glitch That Showed Berkshire Hathaway Down 99.97% Has Been Fixed | CNN Business

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The New York Stock Exchange said Monday that a technical issue that halted trading for some major stocks and sent Berkshire Hathaway down 99.97% has been resolved.

In an update, the NYSE said the affected stocks have reopened and all systems are currently operational.

The Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE’s parent company, has found no indication that the outage was caused by a cyber attack, a senior executive at a major bank in contact with ICE told CNN.

Instead, an NYSE spokesman said there was a technical issue with price bands across the industry that caused trading to be halted in up to 40 symbols listed on the NYSE Group’s exchanges.

The NYSE noted that those price bands are published by the Security Information Processor (SIP) of the Consolidated Band Associations (CTA). The CTA, an industry group, is responsible for publishing real-time trade and quote data.

Dozens of stocks were halted earlier in the day, an indication that they traded outside those so-called upper-lower bound bands, according to the NYSE’s website. That list includes Chipotle and Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by legendary investor Warren Buffett.

For nearly two hours, Berkshire Hathaways Class A shares were listed as trading at just $185.10 a price that would represent a loss of 99.97%. Berkshire closed at $627,400 on Friday.

This is not a Nasdaq issue, Nasdaq spokeswoman Emily Pan told CNN.

Representatives of the Securities and Exchange Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, told CNN that the NYSE’s explanation is difficult to deal with the strange trades that hit the tape.

I’m not buying that explanation. That doesn’t make sense to me, said Saluzzi, a market structure expert and author of Broken Markets.

Trading data provided by Refinitiv shows that $620,700 worth of Berkshire Hathaway changed hands as of 9:44:32 a.m. on Monday. And then, without any explanation, the stock crashed to just $185.10.

All of a sudden, a $185 print appeared. But there was nothing to bring it down level by level, which you would expect to see, Saluzzi said. No sense.

The NYSE said it is reviewing affected trades and will consider canceling those caused by the glitch.

The technical issues did not appear to have affected the broader stock market, which moved mostly lower on economic growth concerns.

Except for Berkshire, most of the top stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) traded only slightly higher or lower.

However, Barrick Gold (GOLD), a Canadian gold and copper producer, appeared to be trading just 25 cents down 98.5% on the day, according to Refinitiv. By midday, Barrick was back to normal, trading at $17.28, up 1.1% on the day.

NuScale Power (SMR), a maker of modular nuclear reactor technology that went public, was IS listed at just 13 cents, down 98.5% on the day. After NuScale reopened, it traded at $8.29, down just 5%.

This story has been updated with additional developments and context.