In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange had a problem that sounds almost impossible today. It had too much trading. Trading volume had risen dramatically, and the paperwork required to process trades, confirmations and delivery instructions began overwhelming the financial system. The SEC later described the period as the “Paperwork Crisis.” The problem became serious enough that trading hours were curtailed. Then came the extraordinary solution. Starting June 12, 1968, the NYSE closed every Wednesday. The Wednesday closures continued through the end of the year, giving brokerage firms time to work through their operational backlog. And the problem didn’t disappear when Wednesdays returned. On January 2, 1969, the exchanges went back to a five day week but trading hours remained restricted while the industry continued dealing with the crisis. Think about what that means. The market wasn’t running out of buyers. It wasn’t running out of sellers. The infrastructure processing the trades was struggling to keep up with the trades themselves. That is a very different kind of market risk. Today, traders think about speed in milliseconds. In 1968, the bottleneck was paperwork. The technology changed. The underlying problem didn’t A market can scale only as fast as the infrastructure supporting it. And sometimes the most important part of a trade isn’t what happens when you press Buy or Sell. It’s everything that has to happen afterward.