Berkshire Hathaway: NYSE says bug that showed shares falling 99.97% has been resolved

New York
CNN
—

The New York Stock Exchange said Monday that a technical issue that halted trading of some major stocks and caused Berkshire Hathaway stock to drop 99.97% has been resolved.

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

InterContinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, found no indication that the disruption was due to a cyberattack, a senior executive at a major bank in contact with ICE told CNN.

Instead, an NYSE spokesperson said there was a “technical issue” with industry-wide price ranges that “resulted” in trading on up to 40 tokens listed on NYSE Group exchanges.

The NYSE noted that these price ranges are published by the Consolidated Tape Association’s (CTA) Security Information Processor (SIP). CTA, an industry group, is responsible for publishing real-time trade data and quotes.

CTA said it I ran into a problem “It may be related to a new software release.” To fix the problem, the industry group said it relied on a secondary data center running the older version of the software.

Dozens of stocks were paused earlier in the day, a sign that they were trading outside the so-called upper and lower limit ranges, according to… New York Stock Exchange website. This list includes Chipotle and Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by legendary investor Warren Buffett.

For about two hours, Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A shares were listed trading at just $185.10 — a price that represented a loss of 99.97%. Berkshire closed at $627,400 on Friday.

The New York Stock Exchange announced that it had decided to “invalidate” or cancel all of Berkshire’s “erroneous” trades between 9:50 a.m. ET and 9:51 a.m. ET of $603,718.30 or less. The stock exchange said the ruling was not eligible for appeal, and indicated that it may cancel other deals.

An SEC spokesperson told CNN: “We are monitoring the issue and communicating with market participants.”

Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, told CNN that the New York Stock Exchange’s explanation is difficult to reconcile with the strange trades shown on the tape.

“I don’t buy that explanation. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Saluzzi, a market structure expert and author of Broken Markets.

Trading data provided by Refinitiv shows that Berkshire Hathaway was trading at $620,700 as of 9:44:32 a.m. Monday. Then, without any explanation, the stock collapsed to just $185.10.

“All of a sudden, there was a print of $185. But there was nothing that would cut it level by level, which is what you would expect to see,” Saluzzi said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

The technical issues did not appear to affect the broader stock market, which moved Most are lower due to economic growth concerns.

Besides Berkshire, most discontinued stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were trading slightly higher or lower.

However, Barrick Gold (gold), a Canadian gold and copper producer, was down 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.

Noscale power (SMR, a maker of modular nuclear reactor technology that went public, 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.