(BFM Bourse) – The New York Stock Exchange cited a technical incident which notably led one of the types of shares of Warren Buffett’s investment company to briefly display a drop of… 99.97%.
A fall of almost 100% in Berkshire Hathaway shares, Warren Buffett’s investment company… This is what many investors were able to observe this Monday on a type of company action ( class A).
Obviously, it was not a real stock market crash, and the fortune of the “oracle of Omaha” did not really disappear at 99% (Buffett holds approximately 16.5% of the capital of Berkshire Hathaway according to Morningstar and is the ninth richest man in the world with $137 billion) in a matter of minutes. Moreover, the other Berkshire Hathaway shares experienced much more “ordinary” developments at the same time than those of class A.
This was all due to a temporary hiccup. According to several American media, the New York Stock Exchange indicated on Monday morning (afternoon in Europe) that technical irregularities had affected the trading of several securities, the trading of which was briefly interrupted. Questions of errors on technical volatility thresholds would, a priori, have caused the disturbances in question.
At the end of the morning, between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., however, order had returned to Wall Street, according to CNBC.
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Odd precedents last week
Berkshire Hathaway class A shares were trading up 0.6% at $631,300 shortly after the European close. It had, during the hiccup, fallen to… 185.10 dollars (-99.97%), according to MarketWatch.
In the process, Warren Buffett’s fortune in the Forbes ranking (which is automatically updated according to the class A share price) “collapsed” virtually by 99.16% to amount to only $1.2 billion. It has since risen to $136.9 billion.
According to a notice from the NYSE, around fifty stocks on Wall Street were disrupted by this incident, including the video game distribution group Gamestop, which is currently taking 30%, driven by a post on Reddit, the operator of AMC cinemas, or the fast food chain Chipotle, or the gold specialist Barrick Gold.
This problem occurs less than a week after the New York Stock Exchange moved to “T+1”, that is to say that the settlement of securities on the shares occurs one day after the order is placed and not no more two days as before. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the American stock market watchdog, had warned that this transition could pose some difficulties.
The incident also comes a few days after an anomaly prevented the S&P 500 index from trading for about an hour, Bloomberg points out. Live trading of the largest U.S. stock index was halted on Thursday as index provider S&P Dow Jones Indices struggled to disseminate information, but the problem did not affect individual stocks and caused only minor disruptions, the agency continues.
“Whether or not it’s a coincidence, all of this (recent technical oddities) is certainly causing a lot of confusion on Wall Street for the second session out of the last three,” said Dave Lutz, head of ETFs at JonesTrading. , quoted by Bloomberg, in a message.
Julien Marion – ©2024 BFM Bourse