A technical glitch with hand-held devices used by floor brokers at the New York Stock Exchange (Nyse) left traders unable to send or receive orders yesterday morning.
The problem also prevented floor traders from sending or receiving reports of trade executions.
Nyse says the glitch - caused by a configuration issue - lasted intermittently from the opening of trading at 9:30am to 11:46am.
During the hitch brokers were forced to send and receive orders from their order-management systems in their booths on the trading floor or manually.
However the algorithmic trading tools added to some hand-held devices last month were not affected. These tools provide brokers with the ability to route all or part of a customer order to an external algo engine directly from their hand-held devices.