Berkshire Hathaway class A shares dropped 99 percent in New York Stock Exchange today due to a technical glitch in the morning trading hours. The class A shares dropped  almost 100 percent to zero due to a technical glitch while the Class B shares were down less than 1 percent. NYSE issued a statement saying the issue has been resolved around noon ET.

The glitch was due to a Limit Up Limit Down (LULD) price band issue which impacted multiple stocks including Berkshire Hathaway , Barrick Gold and Chipotle Mexican Grill and these stocks entered trading pauses due to volatility . The real time price bands are published by Consolidated Tapes Association (CTA) which manages the real time quotes of sellers and buyers including upper limit and lower limit of quotes. Limit Up and Limit Down allows quotes and trading within a specified upper and lower price band to prevent sudden volatility spikes in asset prices. If the stock prices hit upper or lower band then trading is halted for the stocks.

The bands issue was reported by the CTA early morning and there was a switchover to its disaster recovery site to ensure the issue is quickly resolved. Several other stocks were impacted because of the bands issue. The issue reflects that the infrastructure and systems are not perfect and such glitches in the future could impact the investors and traders in the wall street. There has been several technical glitches in the recent times including NASDAQ orders being cancelled in December last year . NYSE faced major glitch in Jan 2023 which impacted the opening Auctions of some stocks.

Although disaster recovery measures are in place but the system is not completely error free as of now for all the major exchanges. With the advent of AI and computing , there should be a more robust systems leveraging AI to prevent these incidents proactively. With the recent development in Generative AI it would be interesting to see how AI uses cases are leveraged in Disaster and Risk management especially in the trading systems.

Berkshires class A shares are the highest priced shares on the Wall Street currently trading at 620,200 USD which is difficult for retail investors to buy. The reason for the high prices are due to the fact that Warren Buffet has never split the stock incentivising long term investments with long term vision for wealth creation. Berkshires Class B shares are priced at 411 USD which helps retail investors to buy these shares at low prices and invest in Warren Buffet’s company.