Australian shares ended mostly flat in disruptive trade after the ASX suffered through technical difficulties that saw trades stop multiple times throughout the day.
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Australian stock traders will be trying to reconcile trades that got lost after the Australian Securities Exchange’s Nasdaq-supplied trading platform melted down yesterday.
The market was due to open properly by 11.30am, according to the ASX.
In the currency market, the dollar traded at 95.889 against a basket of currencies on Monday at 10:47 a.m. HK/SIN, a touch lower than an earlier session high of 96.055.
In the afternoon, ASX issued a statement on the incidents, revealing that “a hardware failure in the main database” was the root cause of the whole incident.
In the currency market, the dollar traded at 96.031 against a basket of currencies on Monday at 6:34 a.m. HK/SIN. Malfunctions at Deutsche Boerse AG, Europe’s biggest derivatives exchange, disrupted trading in February and July 2015, while the New York Stock Exchange had an outage a year ago that lasted 3 1/2 hours.
ASX, -1.38% delayed opening the market by 90 minutes as it worked to resolve the problem, then staggered the start with only portions of the market trading.
But Australia’s corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which regulates the stock exchange, said it will closely examine Monday’s shutdown.
“Historically, Australian trading platforms like ASX have at least met global benchmarks for up-times and reliability, with up-times on an annual basis regularly around 100 per cent”, the regulator said.
Deutsche Bank AG analysts rated ASX neutral in a September 5 report, citing risks of lower equity market trading and reduced capital raising activity.
The exchange closed 23 minutes early on Monday, after trading lasted less than an hour.
AUD/USD traded to a high of $0.7675 (session range of $0.7604 to $0.7604) and sits mid-range now.
However, placing pressure on exporters, the Australian dollar jumped US0.6¢ to US76.40¢ as the USA dollar fell on the softer USA yield outlook.
“We’re rallying on central bank action once again, which has been pretty much been the story of the last five or six years, probably even more”, he said.
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Outages have hit other major stock exchanges in recent years. In periods of low volatility (like we are seeing now), the trade is long ASX 200/short S&P 500.
