NYSE halts trading for over 3 hours. Nothing much happens.

I know that title sounds a little weird, because if a stock exchange stops trading for over 3.5 hours, you don't expect much to happen in that time, and nothing much did happen, but not in the sense you might think.

What happened was this, at around 11.30am EDT, trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor was halted, due to what the exchange called an "internal technical issue", saying that a cyber attack was not the cause.

And yet, despite this, trading seemed to pretty much continue almost as normal on NYSE stocks.  But how is that possible?

The New York Stock Exchange trading floor might be an iconic image, and a central point of trading in NYSE stocks, but it is by no means the only point for trading NYSE.  In fact only 13% of all NYSE stocks that are traded during the day are actually traded through the NYSE trading floor.

There are about a dozen other places where NYSE stocks are traded, plus the options are on a separate platform, as is the OTC (Over The Counter) market, and the alternative market.  The whole NYSE trading floor, is just one place where NYSE stocks are legally traded and the other trading floors were able to pick up the slack.

This story in itself provides us with two lessons, which is pretty rare to be fair.  The first is the simple, always have back up plans, at least 1 and preferably more.  That's a lesson that NYSE owners ICE obviously knew about and their back up plans were already in effect before the NYSE trading floor was halted at around 11.30am EDT.

My main problem with all these other backups is that they are all technologically based.  In other words, it's all the same basic technology, just differently written systems that manage to talk to each other, and yet manage to maintain enough separation that when there was a problem, the other systems managed to keep going.

The second lesson I take from this story is not to be over-reliant on technology.  Technology is actually a very useful thing, but especially these days with all the smartphones that I see people constantly staring at, we are in serious danger of taking this technology for granted.

When I first started doing radio back in 1990, computers were not being used to playout the music or the jingles or the adverts, in fact, they were barely more than a fancy text messaging system between studios.  That all changed in 1992 with the arrival of Pirate FM 102.

In the past 25 years, computers have become a major part of the radio industry, with everything from news production, traffic management, music scheduling, station administration, playout and every other aspect just about handled by computers, and although I'm okay with it being that way, I am okay with it, because I was trained in the old fashioned methods, splicing tape with razor blades and joining together with sticky tape, cueing up records, cassettes and CDs manually, slamming carts into cart machines.  All of these were standard things to learn when I started out in radio and now, they are techniques that many in the industry today wouldn't have a clue how to do, because they've never learned how to do them, because everything is done with computers.

But we are in an era where technology is pervasive, and we need to be aware that we need to be able to cope without it.  The US TV series 'Revolution' dealt with that concept, and it didn't do a bad job of it, but the show was cancelled after 2 seasons and didn't really explore the basic concept as well as maybe it could have, by choosing to start the series 15 years after the permanent blackout had happened.

Maybe the most reassuring thing about this whole situation, is the very fact that despite the main trading floor going down for over 3.5 hours, stocks continued to trade as though nothing had happened.  It suggests to me that all the systems did what they were supposed to do, and kept things going until the system got back up.

Indeed, the NYSE trading floor came back online 50 minutes before the official close, probably giving them just enough time to make sure that nothing else bad was going to happen with their temporary fix, before the close, and then they could spend the next 16-17 hours working on improving upon the temporary fix.

The real acid test will be tomorrow's trading day from 9.30am New York time.  Then we will see if the system repairs have truly worked.