The exchange said it was “now focused on ensuring that the market re-opens on schedule tomorrow morning”.
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The technical issues were reportedly found in an equities trading system called ASX Trade, Stevens said, adding: “What happened today does not meet the high standards of operations and system reliability that we set ourselves, and that our customers should rightly expect of us”.
“It’s extremely frustrating for everybody”, Earl Evans, who has spent nearly 30 years working in financial markets and oversees about A$10 billion ($7.5 billion) at Shaw & Partners in Sydney, said by phone. Mr. Stevens also assured that the failure was not due to cyber threats or attacks and trading is expected to resume normally the next day.
At the time, the delays were blamed on an “issue with a component that allows ASX to manage individual stocks”.
The technical issue is reported to be related to the systems failing to receive orders from stockbrokers and other market participants.
“We apologise for the disruption”, Stevens said.
Australian shares struggled to advance on Monday, with technical glitches marring early dealing and later forcing a halt to afternoon trade.
The market opened at 11:40am, after the ASX fixed – or thought it had fixed – the fault.
Had the market gone down on Wednesday or Thursday it could have been far more frustrating for traders, given key meetings by the Bank of Japan and US Federal Reserve that will greatly affect those trading sessions.
The ASX’s shares fell as much as 2.4 per cent in Sydney trading before trading was halted, while the nation’s benchmark equity gauge, the S&P/ASX 200 Index, was little changed.
Traders have taken to social media to vent their frustration.
“I’d say not a great deal has happened this morning, but we’ll never know”.
Turning to the Aussie sharemarket and SPI futures are flat.
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A problem on ASX’s derivatives platform halted trading in September a year ago, preventing traders from buying and selling everything from interest-rate derivatives to contracts on energy and grains. Eventually, the exchange closed early as the problem could not be resolved.
