NYSE Trading Resumes After Three-Hour Outage

“I don’t think the Greece situation is a focus in the markets beyond the short term”, said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Group in Bedford Hills, New York.

“It appears, from what we know at this stage, that the malfunctions at United and the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor”. The S&P 500 lost 34.65 points, or 1.66 percent, to 2,046.69 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 87.70 points, or 1.75 percent, to 4,909.76. As of 1:25 p.m. Eastern, about two hours after the halt was announced, trading had not yet resumed on the NYSE. The exchanges also will be required to notify the SEC about problems, including any systems that are compromised by hacking.

He says that despite indications that this was not a cyber-breach, “The administration is keenly aware of the risk that exists in cyber space right now”. The USA Department of Justice said Sarao used an automated trading program to manipulate the market.

Other exchanges compete for the orders made to buy and sell stocks.

“The root cause was determined to be a configuration issue”, an NYSE spokesman said Wednesday evening. However, in the long run, the snafu could make it more hard for exchanges to argue against greater oversight from regulators. Nearly 2,000 firms halted trading to protect themselves from the panic selling. ” “Here’s the key portion of the minutes: “[M]any participants expressed concern that a failure of Greece and its official creditors to resolve their differences could result in disruptions in financial markets in the euro area, with possible spillover effects on the United States”.

People sit on a bench near the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, July 8, 2015.

The S&P 500 index is down 30.09 points, or 1.5 percent. In May 2010, the Dow plunged hundreds of points in minutes in an incident that later became known as the “flash crash”.

On March 23, 2012, stock market operator BATS Global Markets tried to go public on its own exchange. In 2013, trading in options in Chicago was halted due to an outage caused by software problems. President Obama and the Treasury have also said that they are watching what’s going down.

“We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue”.

A screen shot of NYSE’s twitter account.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted last November to require routine testing of exchanges’ trading systems. Any securities listed on the NYSE are not now able to be traded.

Other exchanges, including the Nasdaq, remained operating as usual.

Trading of most stocks resumed at 3:10pm EDT and no further problems were reported.

For United, it was the second major technical issue in two months.

Facebook’s much-vaunted initial public offering was delayed because of a Nasdaq trading problem.