The New York Stock Exchange is back in business and stocks are surging.
NYSE enjoyed a smooth opening and stocks soared on Thursday morning following a major glitch that shut down trading for nearly four hours on Wednesday. The Dow opened more than 240 points higher.
The return to normalcy at NYSE should allow investors and regulators to breathe a sigh of relief. The trading halt generated international headlines and briefly raised concerns about a cyber attack. However, NYSE and regulators say the outage was caused by an internal technical problem, not hackers.
“Business as usual. Whatever ghost was in the machine yesterday has obviously been extracted out,” Keith Bliss, director of sales and marketing at Cuttone & Company told CNN from the trading floor.
Stock surge: Investors have another reason to smile on Thursday: The bull market in stocks looks like it’s finding its legs again. Stocks surging right out of the gate, joining in a global rally that started in the rollercoaster Chinese stock market.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.3%, and the Nasdaq advanced 1.5%. The gains bring the S&P 500 back into positive territory on the year, although the Dow remains in the red by a bit.
Wall Street cheered a huge rebound in China, which is scrambling to put a bottom under its crashing stock market. The Shanghai Composite declined another 3% at the opening bell and then did a 180 and ended the day up a whopping 5.8%
What caused the outage? It’s not clear exactly what caused trading to shut down at NYSE on Wednesday.
At first, the exchange said it was experiencing an “internal technical issue.” Later, NYSE explained the “root cause was determined to be a configuration issue.” That suggests a hiccup in the sophisticated software that powers the extremely complex trading systems at the heart of the stock market.
It’s important to note that investors were still able to buy and sell stocks despite the glitch. The outage only impacted NYSE, leaving other exchanges like Nasdaq and BATS to pick up the slack.
As a result of the trading halt, NYSE’s market share for the stock market tumbled to a record low on Wednesday, according to Nanex, a firm that studies stock-market data. Trading resumed shortly after 3 pm ET.
The NYSE outage was hardly the first glitch to impact the U.S. stock market. Previous problems include the 2013 incident at the Nasdaq that halted trading on all Nasdaq-listed stocks and the 2010 Flash Crash that mysteriously sent U.S. stocks plummeting before a rebound.