Thankfully the volatility is yet to come – a breakdown on a day like the previous Monday (when the market lost $34 billion in a 2.2% plunge), could have been disastrous. If they want to, they need to be sure it is there.
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Less than two months into Dominic Stevens’s tenure, the ASX Ltd. chief executive officer was forced to apologize for a hardware failure that saw the equity exchange open late and shut early on Monday in its worst such disruption in nearly five years. Australia’s securities regulator said it was monitoring the problem.
“It is important infrastructure for Australia and it is not acceptable that it goes down like that, really, that’s the cold reality of the situation”, said Andrew Green, chief executive, Stockbrokers Association of Australia.
ASX frustrated investors by failing to open on time because of a technical glitch. “As an industry our members suffered with the outage and they’re asking how this can happen in this day and age, and we, as the industry body, share that frustration”, he said.
Some social media users couldn’t resist poking fun at ASX’s woes.
He explained, “The primary issue arose from a hardware failure in the main database used by the system”.
But stock exchanges were complicated, so the transition to a backup might not happen in a matter of minutes.
The nature of its communication with the market was perceived as inadequate, he said.
“Today, ASX encountered issues with our equities trading system, ASX Trade”.
ASX delayed the normal 10 a.m. local time equity market opening until 11:30 a.m. due to an issue relating to a component that allows it to manage individual stocks, Matthew Gibbs, a spokesman for ASX in Sydney said earlier, adding that the company was working with its technology vendor Nasdaq Inc.to prevent a recurrence.
The exchange then said the market was open for all securities except for those in the range of N-R, the timetable for which then flagged at entering pre-open at 1:00pm AEST for a 1:20pm AEST open. The problems with ASX also spilled over into another exchange, Chi-X Australia.
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