While NYSE trading remains halted now for more than two hours, trading in NYSE listed securities has continued in a relatively normal manner on other electronic platforms, including NYSE ARCA and BATS.
For those in the FX world, much of the talk recently has been about bringing currency trading on-exchange. An event like this might make industry executives think twice about that. With the current everyone-is-a-market-maker system in FX, the ‘market’ is a very distributed one. A glitch (or cyber attack) at one or even several industry participants would hardly affect the overall market, as it is so widely distributed. If things went on-exchange, then – as with the NYSE today – one major exchange going down can cause all sort of chaos.
For now, Exchange officials as well as US Homeland Security representatives have said they have ruled out some sort of cyber attack, stating that the reason was internal – i.e. a technology glitch. One source noted that a new piece of software was introduced at the NYSE this morning, and some previously undetected bugs in the software may have led to the glitch.
All open orders at the time of the halt have been cancelled by the NYSE.
We will continue to follow this developing story. Stay tuned to LeapRate…