Australian Stock Exchange
A man reacts as he looks at a board displaying stock prices at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in Sydney, Australia, April 26, 2016. Reuters/David Gray

The technical glitch that hit the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) on Monday angered investors and traders. It is the longest outage to hit the bourse in five years, which allowed only an hour’s worth of full trading.

The confusing technical problem caused a 90-minute delay in market opening, while stock were available to trade in groups, instead of the whole market. As a result of the glitch, the ASX says shares were set to open at Monday’s closing price or Friday’s closing price if there was no trade on Monday, reports Australian Financial Review.

What frustrated the market was that the ASX did not provide a detailed explanation of the technical glitch’s cause, although it ruled out a cyber attack. The problem is likely due to an internal hardware failure in which the component failed to receive orders from stockbrokers and other market participants.

It resulted in a low volume of trade on Monday. Besides the late opening, all traders were forced to list with an “enquire” status until traders sporadically returned online. It left the entire market inaccessible until 1 pm and then the problem re-occurred at 2 pm. By 3:30 pm, the ASX announced early closure it failed to bring back the market fully.

Dominic Stevens, chief executive of ASX, apologised for the problem and said the bourse would reopen on Tuesday as scheduled. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission was informed of the technical glitch on Monday morning. However, the regulator has not yet initiated a formal inquiry into the problem.

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Source: CommSecTV

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