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From Reuters at Yahoo for educational purposes only:

Sunday August 22, 11:27 pm Eastern Time

NYMEX ACCESS halts trading with technical glitch

SINGAPORE, Aug 23 (Reuters) - The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) out-of-hours trading system has halted operations owing to technical problems, brokers said on Monday.

Brokers said ACCESS came to a halt just before 0300 GMT. This followed a delayed start to trading earlier, traders said.

The start of trading was delayed by two hours and 40 minutes to 0140 GMT, traders said. The system then operated for about one hour and 15 minutes before it was halted, they said.

During trading, NYMEX October crude rose to a fresh 22-month high of $22.11 per barrel on concern about Hurricane Bret in the United States.

Traders said prices rose on worries that the storm would force oil fields and refineries to shut down, curtailing the supply of crude and products into the U.S. -- the world's biggest oil consumer.

Citgo Petroleum Corp said it had shut down its 280,000-bpd Corpus Christi refinery in Texas as a precaution because the company feared that the plant was directly in line with the storm's path.

October crude futures were last traded at $22.02 per barrel at the time the NYMEX ACCESS system halted.

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), August 22, 1999