A technical error causes chaos on Wall Street and ‘destroys’ Warren Buffett’s company

A technical problem on the New York Stock Exchange has caused confusion on Wall Street by showing that companies like Berkshire Hathaway were sinking 99.97% at times, which has caused its trading to be suspended. A failure that has also been seen in other firms such as Chipotle, Barry Gold, Bank of Montreal or Nuscale Power, although the exact number of securities that would have had difficulties is unknown.

The New York Stock Exchange has acknowledged a technical failure related to price bands, a mechanism used to suspend trading of securities in times of excessive volatility. The problem has caused the trading of about 30 companies to stop for just over an hour, among which were Berkshire Hathaway’s A shares. According to information provided by the NYSE, in the first minutes of trading, some 4,000 transactions in Berkshire A securities were exchanged just before its suspension. A negotiation that does remain in class B, which registers a slight drop of 1%.

Among the securities affected by the suspension have been some Spaniards that operate through certificates of deposit (ADR) such as Telefónica or the Chilean subsidiary of Santander.

The technical failure that the NYSE market is registering occurs a few days after the United States Stock Exchange modified the time it takes to buy and sell shares by going from T+2 to T+1. Since last May 29, the settlement time for operations on the New York Stock Exchange has been reduced by half in order to minimize the risks of the financial system.

The technical problems would also have affected the platform used by American stock exchanges to provide real-time information, the Consolidated Tape Association, which has announced that a failure would have forced it to change its disaster recovery center.

Although the market infrastructures, both in the negotiation part and in the post-trading part, are considered critical for cybersecurity purposes, interruptions due to technical problems continue to occur every year, although they are punctual. In Europe, trading through Deutsche Börse’s equity and derivatives platforms was paralyzed in April 2020, a failure that occurred again months later.

Some rulings that also had their replica in Euronext, operator of stock exchanges such as those of Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Lisbon or Milan, affected in October 2020 by a supply outage at the closing of the auction. Outside Europe, the New Zealand Stock Exchange was closed for four days due to a cyber attack in 2020 and in the United States, the Nasdaq stopped operating in August 1987 for an hour and a half because a squirrel had chewed a cable at the facilities. its servers. CME, the owner of the Chicago futures and derivatives exchange, was unable to provide data for more than an hour last week due to another error.

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