By Isabelle Stanley for Dailymail.Com and Reuters
3:37 PM June 3, 2024, updated 5:25 PM June 3, 2024
- About 60 stocks were affected by the technical glitch
- Some listed prices plummeted by 99 percent, while others saw small declines
The New York Stock Exchange has resolved a ‘technical problem’ that caused tens of billions of shares to go public with a price loss of up to 99 percent.
Stocks listed on the NYSE, such as Berkshire Hathaway, GameStop, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Barrick Gold, were halted Monday morning due to volatility.
The affected stocks have since reopened or are in the process of reopening and the issue has been resolved, the NYSE said.
Berkshire shares fell 99.97 percent, with their Class A shares trading at just $185.10. Shares resumed trading at normal levels around 11:35 am.
There were fewer than 4,000 recorded trades in Berkshire’s A-class shares before trading was halted.
Similarly, Barrick Gold was listed at just 25 cents, down 98.5 percent on the day.
And NuScale Power was down 13 cents, down 98.5 percent on the day.
According to the NYSE website, about 60 stocks were affected, with some reporting only minor price changes.
NYSE Equities said earlier on Monday it is investigating a reported technical issue involving the Limit Up-Limit Down bands, which sent dozens of listed stocks into volatility pauses.
The LULD mechanism is intended to prevent extraordinary market volatility and extreme price movements in individual securities.
It prevents trading from taking place outside specific price bands that are continuously updated throughout the trading day.
The ranges are set at a percentage above and below the average reference price of the security over the immediately preceding five-minute period.
Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, told CNN: ‘Berkshire, Chipotle and a few others were shut down for no apparent reason. Something strange is going on.’
He added: “They are incorrect trading reports and will be withdrawn from the tape.
“It’s someone who has a glitch, whether it’s the stock market or a market maker.”
The first stock to be placed under a LULD pause, according to the NYSE website, was GameStop.
Shares of GameStop rose this morning after Keith Gill, the man who inspired the 2021 short squeeze, resurfaced on Reddit on Sunday.
Gill posted a screenshot of a $116 million position in GameStop stock, plus a big bet that the stock price will rise.
When pre-market trading opened this morning, the stock price rose as much as 80 percent to more than $40 per share. The price closed at $23.14 on Friday.
It was a throwback to 2021 when GameStop made headlines for a short squeeze on its stock.
At the time, it was a video game retailer struggling to survive as consumers quickly switched from discs to digital downloads.
The big Wall Street hedge funds bet against it, or shorted the stock, expecting it to go bankrupt. But Gill and his fans disagreed and bought millions of GameStop shares.