The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on the floor for the rest of the session Wednesday in Amazon, Booking Holdings and Alphabet due to a "price scale code issue," according to the exchange's website. The stocks traded normally elsewhere, including on their home exchanges.
The exchange said "any open orders in these securities will be cancelled" on its status page.
The issue affected stocks with prices above $1,000 which trade primarily at the Nasdaq. Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline), Amazon and Alphabet are the three highest-priced stocks in the S&P 500 and the only ones with prices that are four digits.
Overall trading volume was in line for the names as activity was normal on their home exchanges and other venues. Trading continued on NYSE's own Arca and NYSE-American systems in the stocks.
The NYSE floor began to allow trading in all listed securities (including those listed on Nasdaq) on April 9 of this year. Trading in all listed securities had already been occurring on the NYSE's electronic platform, known as NYSE-Arca, and on the old American Stock Exchange, now known as NYSE-American.
The exchange announced its plan to expand floor trading to 8,600 U.S. securities last year.
Earlier Wednesday, NYSE posted a status update calling out an issue with the prices:
11:16am "NYSE customers using Binary CCG order entry ports are advised that execution reports priced at or above $1000 in some Tapes B and C securities (including AMZN, BKNG, GOOG, GOOGL) are being published with a 'price scale' code of 5. NYSE expects this behavior to continue for trading today and will provide a further update before the start of trading tomorrow.
All other systems, including the price scale code for Tapes B and C market data, are operating normally. "
"To me it sounds extremely minor and not a big deal," said Joe Saluzzi, partner and co-founder at Themis Trading.
The NYSE told CNBC that a small group of clients were receiving execution reports that had not arrived in the expected format. So out of an abundance of caution the exchange decided to suspend trading in five securities on the NYSE floor Wednesday.
— With reporting by Bob Pisani