The stock exchange added a circuit breaker rule. Here's what actually stops trading when prices crash.

Originally reported as: “PSE implements market-wide circuit breaker mechanism to curb excessive intraday volatility”

The local stock exchange rolled out a new market-wide circuit breaker rule, an automatic mechanism that pauses trading for a set period if the benchmark index falls by a certain percentage in a single session. Circuit breakers exist to interrupt panic selling, forcing investors, brokers, and trading algorithms into a brief pause to absorb news calmly instead of dumping shares reflexively. The idea borrows directly from how electrical circuit breakers stop a power surge before it destroys the whole system. Trading resumes after the halt, and the rule doesn't prevent losses on any given day, it simply changes the speed at which they're allowed to happen.