Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mass sell offs tend to create unorderly markets, which is not beneficial for anyone. The concept was introduced in US equities after the ‘87 crash, but was only consistently implemented for NYSE-listed stocks. In ‘13 these were made consistent and market wide (thus MWCB), set against a widely published value of the S&P (so that the control was predictable; thus how it executed today). FYI, there are also bidirectiona…
> Mass sell offs tend to create unorderly markets, which is not beneficial for anyone. It's beneficial for people who want to buy stocks cheaply or if we truly believe that markets are about price discovery.
Exactly, and when you have an unorderly market, price discovery becomes problematic.
It’s the same reason the single stock LULD bands exist (which put the brakes on both rapid downward and rapid upward movement). Stopping for 15 minutes (or 5 in the case of a LULD pause) is not detrimental to the process of establishing orderly price discovery.
In the event a stock is going to keep rising or falling due to legitimate changes in valuation it will continue to do so (look at NASDAQ’s halts page today to see stocks that have hit their bands multiple times).