Our technology has become so advanced that markets are never hit by glitches, right?
Not at all. The London Stock Exchange’s one-hour delay to its open on Thursday is only the latest high-profile malfunction to rile up traders.
In Thursday’s incident, the operator of the U.K.’s main bourse blamed a “technical issue,” which has now been resolved, for the opening auction’s delayed start at 9 a.m. London time, or 4 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, rather than the usual 8 a.m.
The hitch appeared to have only a modest effect on sentiment, with the blue-chip FTSE 100 equity benchmark
UKX, -0.11%
recently down 0.1% after initially rising as trading began. Shares in bourse operator London Stock Exchange Group PLC
LSE, -0.42%
were lower by 0.5%.
There have been a fair number of crashes and other malfunctions, as the list of recent glitches below shows. Note that it’s not a complete tally, just some highlights:
• July 2017: Huge price moves for Apple
AAPL, +0.35%
, Amazon.com
AMZN, -0.04%
and other popular stocks erroneously appeared live on popular websites such as Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.
The Nasdaq exchange
NDAQ, +1.68%
said that happened because test data were apparently mistakenly disseminated by third-party providers to those sites.
• December 2016: The largest U.S. trading venue for ETFs — NYSE Arca — suffered a technical glitch that forced a 15-minute trading halt for the platform.
• October 2015: It was the British pound’s
GBPUSD, +0.2982%
turn for a “flash crash,” as the currency dived during Asian trading hours.
• August 2015: Some of Wall Street’s biggest exchange-traded funds fell hard and then bounced back, as analysts blamed algorithmic trading for this flash crash for ETFs.
• August 2013: A “flash freeze” hit the Nasdaq, leading to a three-hour trading shutdown.
• May 2010: A dramatic flash crash spooked traders, as the Dow industrials
DJIA, +1.40%
dived by almost 1,000 points before quickly recovering. The plunge led to much debate, new regulations and even convictions for use of a bluffing tactic called “spoofing.”
With that history to contend with, traders may have become more able to shrug glitches off. In the wake of Thursday’s malfunction in the U.K., some were at least managing to make wisecracks as they waited out the opening delay.
Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, joked in a tweet about conducting a guessing game on when trading actually would start:
#LSEOpeningAuctionGuesses would have been a good one
— Mike van Dulken (@Accendo_Mike) June 7, 2018
It was a reference to #NFPGuesses, a Twitter phenomenon in which people give their guess for the headline number in the monthly U.S. jobs report, also known as the nonfarm payrolls release.
This is an updated version of a story first published on July 4, 2017.
Source : MTV
