Business As Usual For Many Investors Despite NYSE Shutdown
(CBS) -- A computer crash halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange as everything came to a stop at 10:32 a.m.
Things didn't resume until three hours and 38 minutes later at 2:10 this afternoon.
CBS 2's Derrick Blakley takes a closer look at what happened.
At the NYSE, the closing bell brought more relief than exuberance after an IT malfunction shut down the exchange for more than three and a half hours.
"Once they had opened all the stocks, things started malfunctioning in some way," said NYSE trader Peter Tuchman.
New York traders unable to fill orders produced an eerie silence on the trading floor.
"They decided the best things they could do to protect people is to shut the market down," Tuchman said.
In Chicago, news of the shutdown left some investors uneasy.
"It can happen, we all know these things do and can and do happen but we need an explanation," said investor Christine Randin.
But, for the 40 trade consultants at Chicago's TD Ameritrade office, it was pretty much business as usual.
"One of the things people don't realize is that the New York Stock Exchange only does about 20 percent of the total stock volume every day," said J.J. Kinahan, chief market strategist of TD Ameritrade. "So the orders that were there just went elsewhere."
Even investors contacting the office didn't seem panicked. Kinahan says the real story is that despite New York's breakdown, the worldwide system worked.
"15 years ago, if the phone system went down, nobody had access," Kinahan said. "The great thing about electronic trading is it gives everybody access in milliseconds and there is redundancy in the systems"
Not much effect here at the Merc Exchange either, since that market trades futures contracts on commodities and currencies, not stocks.
NYSE officials say the problem was caused by an attempted software update, not by cyber-terrorism.
