Singapore Exchange to remain closed for day after malfunction
Duplicate trade confirmation messages cause fourth market outage in last two years, stops trading in shares like DBS Group, Singapore Airlines
Singapore Exchange has decided to halt stock trading for the rest of Thursday, after a technical malfunction caused a stoppage earlier in the day.
The bourse said the suspension, which began at 11.38am local time, was caused by duplicate trade confirmation messages. SGX initially said it expected to reopen at 2pm local time, but later pushed that back to 4pm before announcing that trading would not resume Thursday.
Andrew Sullivan, managing director of sales trading with Haitong International Securities Group in Hong Kong had earlier in the day said: “If they don’t get it going today then people are going to be very upset. The stoppage hurts SGX’s credibility and reputation as an international market that can cope with any kind of situation.”
Thursday’s stoppage is the second malfunction of SGX’s systems in the past year, after a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August due to a technical fault.
In 2014, the Monetary Authority of Singapore reprimanded SGX for two trading disruptions, a blow for the bourse operator under former chief executive Magnus Bocker. He pledged to review the exchange’s processes to prevent a recurrence. In July 2015, Bocker was replaced by Loh Boon Chye, the former head of Asia-Pacific global markets at Bank of America.