Trading at the NYSE Euronext’s NYSE MKT exchange was halted briefly today. What is important here is not that the trading halt barely last two minutes, but that more than 400 symbols were temporarily unavailable for trading. This is not a miniature flash crash but an unavailable crash for electronic traders.
Source: Frank Golhen, via Wikimedia Commons
Trading issues come up from time to time and they will likely only keep coming up in the future. No matter how much effort the exchanges take, there is just a myriad of things that can wrong with electronic trading systems. Most technology workers know by now that what can go wrong will go wrong. The trick is to keep the instances of failure to a minimum.
The NYSE MKT trading unit said, “The NYSE MKT cash equities market resolved an issue that occurred between 13:15:22 and 13:17:23. Order processing and trade execution in the NYSE MKT’s 446 symbols were temporarily unavailable. All NYSE MKT trading systems are functioning normally.”
The reality is that this is not one of those instances where the nuisance likely resulted in catastrophic financial failure because there was not much happening in the market at the time. Still, investors remain on shaky ground and trusting financial markets is still very toughy for many investors.
Take This Retirement Quiz To Get Matched With An Advisor Now (Sponsored)
Are you ready for retirement? Planning for retirement can be overwhelming, that’s why it could be a good idea to speak to a fiduciary financial advisor about your goals today.
Start by taking this retirement quiz right here from SmartAsset that will match you with up to 3 financial advisors that serve your area and beyond in 5 minutes. Smart Asset is now matching over 50,000 people a month.
Click here now to get started.
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.
Editors' Picks
