ASX fails to open on Monday

Markets opened 90 minutes late, systems struggled throughout the day, and at 2:00pm the ASX waved the white flag.

Moreover, the New York Stock Exchange went down for almost four hours a year ago because of an “internal technical issue”.

The ASX explained at the time that there was a technical problem with its online eLodgement platform. I am sure it will, as these issues happen, but as long as we know it won’t happen again then confidence is not materially lost.

ASX said in a media statement that the market would not re-open on 19 September, and there would be no closing single price auction.

She promises a “full detailed incident report” later this week, and says the ASX has scheduled a customer forum for next week.

The ASX’s typically operates from 10 am to 4 pm local time, but on Monday pre-open trading did not begin until 11.10 am.

Only portions of the ASX were available on Monday.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before”, said Niv Dagan, the Melbourne-based executive director at Peak Asset Management LLC. “There would’ve been some position adjusting last week and on Monday and tomorrow” ahead of the Fed and BOJ meetings, he said.

“From the ASX200 as an index, it’s just below 5,300 points still”.

The week is off to a terrible start for Australia’s top stock exchange.

Chi-X Australia, a rival stock exchange, was also forced to delay its opening although it was able to transact for most of Monday.

In Singapore, a malfunction halted share trading in July, prompting the head of the exchange operator to apologize and attracting a rebuke from the city-state’s central bank.

CommSec market analyst Steven Daghlian said due to the delays and uncertainty only about AU$1.2 billion worth of shares were traded during the day, which was 20 percent of the share value traded the previous Monday.

ASX has its own history of glitches.

The market also suspended trades for 30 minutes in February, due to a glitch. More recently, a problem on the bourse’s derivatives platform halted trading in September past year.