Technical glitch behind 99% drop in Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway stock

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) shocked some investors with stock price drops as large as 99% in Berkshire Hathaway’s case on Monday. However, the incorrect prices were displayed due to a technical issue, the NYSE explained.

For a brief period in early trading on June 3rd, it appeared that you could afford to invest in Berkshire Hathaway's A share class, which was listed as having tanked by 99.9% to just $185 from almost $621,000.

The largest shareholder and one of the most successful investors of all time, Warren Buffet, momentarily lost his 7th place in the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List, dropping down to 2,521st place, users on X noticed. Even then, he was still a billionaire.

A glitch briefly made Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathway lose over 99% of its value today - which made Buffet lose over 99% of his net worth for a few minutes.

He was still a billionaire.

A reminder that billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers. pic.twitter.com/MzRfy3QaAn

undefined Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) June 3, 2024

It turns out that it was a glitch caused by a software issue at Consolidated Tape Association (CTA), which publishes real-time trade, quote data and price bands via its Security Information Processor (SIP).

“CTA experienced an issue with Limit Up/Limit Down price bands that may have been related to a new software release. To resolve the issue, CTA failed over to the secondary data center, which is operating on the previous version of the software,” CTA said in a report.

Berkshire Hathaway's A share class trading was halted from 9:50 a.m. to 11.35 a.m. on Monday. NYSE data reveals that 48 other stocks were also affected, including Chipotle Mexican Grill, NuScale Power Corporation, GameStop, and others.

According to CTA, 49 symbols were subject to trading pauses between 9:30 a.m. and 10:27 a.m. They were potentially impacted by erroneous price bands due to the software release.

The issue was resolved by failover to the secondary site, allowing normal processing to resume after 10:27 a.m.

Later, the NYSE announced that it “has ruled to bust all erroneous trades in Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK A) from 09:50- 9:51 at or below $603,718.30 related to the CTA SIP issue.”

In the evening, the NYSE concluded that “a technical issue with industry-wide price bands published by the CTA SIP triggered halts in a number of stocks listed on the NYSE Group exchanges this morning.”

If you invested $1,000 in Berkshire Hathaway around 10am morning, you would now have $3.4 million.

Warren Buffett is just that good. pic.twitter.com/GdszzyuvWd

undefined Daniel Feldman 🟥 (@d_feldman) June 3, 2024

According to CNN, besides Berkshire, most of the halted stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were only trading slightly higher or lower, with the exceptions of Barrick Gold, which was 98.5% down, and NuScale, listed 98.5% down.

According to NYSE, all impacted stocks have since reopened, the price bands issue has been resolved, and all systems are currently operational.