UPDATED.
The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has today, Tuesday 5 December, experienced its second outage of AIM stocks trading in less than two months.
LSE confirmed in a member notice at 9:23 am this morning that it was investigating an issue impacting its trading system and that it was “undertaking immediate analysis”. Trading on all instruments other than FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and IOB securities was halted until 9:55 am when the exchange confirmed that it was set to resume trading at 10:15 am.
“Instruments will go into auction at 09:55 with uncrossing beginning at 10:15. All live orders remain on the system,” said the exchange in an update.
However, following the opening of trading once again with said auction the problem reoccurred. In an update at 11:56 am, the exchange confirmed the issue was ongoing and that it was continuing to investigate.
In a later update, the exchange confirmed trading in halted securities was due to commence once again: “Order driven securities will enter into a re-opening auction at 12:20 with uncrossing beginning at 12:40. During this period, instrument status will be shown as Halted but customers will be able to manage their orders in the system. After the uncrossing, the instrument status will be updated to Regular Trading.”
“At 12:20, SETSqx securities will return to their regular schedule but instrument status will show as Halted. In SETSqx securities, customers will be able to manage quotes and orders as normal in this period, with the next scheduled auction uncrossing at 14:00 as per the normal schedule after which the instrument status will move from Halted to a instrument status that reflects its regular schedule. Pure quote driven securities will continue to show as Halted although quotes can still be managed in the system with investigations ongoing.”
In its latest update at 12:43 pm, the exchange confirmed that trading on all impacted securities had resumed.
Read more: ESMA publishes recommendations for trading venues in the event of a market outage
It is the second incident of this kind to take place on the LSE in less than two months after it saw a similar outage on 19 October that halted trading in everything except FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and IOB securities which were still operational.
The outage is likely to spur on ongoing analysis by regulators globally over the stability and resilience of exchanges and procedures during market outages – specifically as regards their communications.