A technical error at the New York Stock Exchange resulted in numerous erroneous trading volatility halts, including for Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Abbott Laboratories, and odd trades in at least two stocks early in the cash session Monday.

The forced pauses, which began shortly before 9:45 a.m. in New York, were resolved not long after 11 a.m. and the stocks resumed normal trading, according to statements from NYSE. The firm said a technical issue with the “industry-wide” price bands published by the Consolidated Tape Association Securities Information Processor led to the halts. 

In addition to the volatility halts, trades in Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. appeared to go off at mistaken prices. About a dozen trades showed shares changed hands at US$185.10 around 9:50 a.m., a discount of 99.97 per cent to Friday’s closing price of $627,400. NuScale Power Corp. had a similar glitch, with trades that printed at about 99 per cent below the prior price.

“It’s very confusing that it’s happening in just a few shares,” said Jonathan Corpina, senior managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners, who typically works on the floor of the NYSE. “I would assume that those bad trades will be broken.” 

A representative for NYSE declined to comment on the matter beyond the exchange’s market status update page. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.

The limit up-limit down trading bands typically govern when stocks are paused for volatility. The SIP is a single data feed where regulatory bodies process and consolidate bid and ask quotes and trades from all U.S. exchanges. The sudden disruptions Monday come just days after a glitch left the S&P 500 Index without live pricing for an hour, and as the market adapts to quicker settlement times for U.S. stock trades.

“A little weird, but almost undoubtedly coincidental,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers LLC, of the NYSE issue after last week’s S&P 500 Index glitch. “We’ve gotten used to huge amounts of uptimes without exchange incidents, so when a couple of glitches in a row occur it is notable.”

Chipotle was down 1.2 per cent at 9:44 a.m. New York time when it was halted. Abbott gained as much as 1.9 per cent on Monday. Halts are normally triggered by a series of factors, most commonly for rapid and large changes in price and volume. Chipotle resumed trading at 10:21 a.m. in New York and was down about 2.5 per cent.

The glitches come a week after U.S. stock exchanges switched to one-day settlement, and only a few days after a confusing blip caused the S&P 500 to not print updates for about an hour. On Thursday, live pricing stopped for the biggest US equity index as the index provider S&P Dow Jones Indices had trouble disseminating the information, but the glitch did not affect individual stocks and resulted in only minor disruptions. 

“Whether a coincidence or not, it is certainly causing a pile of confusion on the street for the second session out of the last three,” Dave Lutz, head of ETFs at JonesTrading, said in a message.

The disruptions are reminiscent of a confusing episode in January 2023, when a staffer at the New York Stock Exchange’s backup data center in Chicago left a backup system running in an error that led to wild price swings for hundreds of stocks when the market opened.