Trading in Australian stocks suspended for second time

The share market did not kick off until 1130 AEST on Monday, an hour and a half after it was due to open.

The technical issues have plagued the ASX for most of the day, with less than three hours trade out of a normal six.

The Australian share market has seen trade end early, as technical problems which delayed the market open have continued to plague the ASX.

At 3.35pm ASX announced that the market would not re-open and that there would be no CSPA.

“A company like the ASX would normally have systems in place to be able to seamlessly and transparently “fail over” to a backup system in the case of any kind of hardware failure”. That would be answered in its incident report due later this week, the ASX said.

Later in the afternoon, ASX managing director Dominic Stevens said the error arose from a hardware failure in the main database, which caused a “number of knock-on consequences that affected the operation of the market”. The Australian dollar traded at USD 0.7532, compared to its last close at USD 0.7488. ThinkMarkets forex analyst Matt Simpson said the currency was likely to be volatile in yen terms and could break a key support level of ¥76 if the BoJ under delivers at its policy meeting on Wednesday. “It’s a bit of a black mark for the reputation”.

“It is a welcome relief after yesterday’s two disruptions”, Credit Suisse equity strategist Damien Boey told Reuters after Tuesday’s open.

The big four banks posted solid gains, while industrials and several big miners also helped lift the market. But it has been a long time when a whole day’s trading was made irrelevant because of the tech problems.

In 2014, Chi-X Australia Pty, which operates a competing stock-trading system, halted its stock trading platform for the remainder of a session to fix a technical issue.

ASX has its own history of glitches.

Transactions made within a 43-second window ahead of the delayed start were cancelled and the staggered opening meant the entire market was inaccessible until 1pm and then again shortly after 2pm. More recently, a problem on the bourse’s derivatives platform halted trading in September a year ago.

The S&P/ASX 200 was down in early trade, but recovered to be nearly unchanged at 0030 GMT, as traders look overseas for direction, ahead of crucial central bank meetings in the United States and Japan.