Circuit Breakers for Stocks Triggered a Second Time in 3 Days

(Bloomberg) -- An exchange-mandated circuit breaker halted trading for 15 minutes for the second time in three days after the S&P 500 fell 7% from its Tuesday close.

Trading will pause again if the index drops 13% during Wednesday’s session -- a drop of that magnitude would bring the S&P to 2,200.39. A 20% intra-day drop would see markets close for the remainder of the session.

The index stayed volatile after U.S. stocks rebounded Tuesday from the biggest rout since 1987. Investors are struggling to price in how much damage will be caused by the growing list of cancellations of events and shuttering of borders and businesses.

“The wild market gyrations that we’ve been seeing and limit-up, limit-down from day to day reflect a fragile state in the market overall - there’s little visibility right now regarding the future, potentially for the global economy,” said Candice Bangsund, portfolio manager of global asset allocation at Fiera Capital Corp. “Investors are most certainly going to remain on edge and I think that heightened level of volatility that we’ve been seeing in the market over the last week has accentuated that move. We expect these near-term gyrations to continue.”

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