NYSE outage blamed on bad software upgrade

After a big down day yesterday following a bloodbath in Chinese stock markets and an outage on the New York Stock Exchange, stocks rebounded Thursday as Chinese stocks jumped nearly 6%.

You can read all about it on social media and newspapers, but you won’t find a trace of it where it really matters: Your next 401(k) statement.

It’s important to note that investors were still able to buy and sell stocks despite the glitch.

Long gone are the days when the only exchanges around were the Big Board and the Nasdaq, with floor traders handling huge percentages of stock trading by hand.

“The suspension of trading at the New York Stock Exchange, arising from technical issues, highlights the need for bourses to be prepared for any eventuality”, PSE President and Chief Executive Officer Hans B.

The outage occurred four months before new SEC rules take effect that hold exchanges and some private trading venues accountable for technology disruptions.

As a result of the trading halt, NYSE’s share of the trading action tumbled to a record low on Wednesday, according to Nanex, a firm that studies stock market data. Compare that to only a few years ago, when over 80 percent of stock trades went through the NYSE. That’s when NYSE technicians discovered the mistake.

But Google, Alibaba, Baidu and other tech companies are aggressively working on their own self-driving vehicles, and could leapfrog the auto industry in bringing them to market. It’s not clear exactly what caused trading to shut down at NYSE on Wednesday.

KEEPING SCORE: The Standard & Poor’s 500 index increased 23 points, or 1.2 percent, to 2,074.

In China, frantic efforts by authorities to stop a monthlong rout in the country’s stock market met with some success.

The NYSE holds an auction at the end of trading each day to set the closing prices of hundreds of stocks, which are used to determine the value of mutual funds and other investments.

Boosting investor sentiment, minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June meeting indicated that the United States central bank needed to see more signs of a strengthening economy before raising rates.

Mace Blicksilver, director of Marblehead Asset Management, said the NYSE outage was less of a worry than fears about the global economy.

Back in the USA, while authorities have denied any signs of a cyber-attack at the NYSE, there had been some unusual rumors from anonymous calls that were made prior to the exchange opening suggesting that, “Wednesday could be a hard day for Wall Street”.