After four hours of suspended trading, SIX Swiss Exchange resumed trading at 1.30pm BST on Wednesday 31 July following technical issues with its SIX MDDX Multi-Dimensional Data fluX (SIX MDDX) data feed.
Currently, the cause of the issue is still being analysed by the exchange, with a message sent out to the market that order maintenance is possible for the time being.
Specifically, the SIX Swiss Exchange resumed trading for equities and investment funds at 1.30pm BST, while options and structured products resumed at 1.45pm BST and bond trading 15 minutes later at 2pm BST.
The trading venue halted early on Wednesday and looked to be rebounding around midday before being halted again at 11.23am BST, as reported by The TRADE.
This is the second time in the space of just over a year that Swiss Exchange has seen a major disruption. Last June, the venue experienced its worst outage for over a decade wherein trading was halted for three hours following issues with equities and options trading.
This outage comes amid a string of similar incidences across both the EU and the UK, fuelling the flames of market pressure to reinforce key infrastructure.
Read more: Market outages are one area where UK and EU could collaborate amid divergence, says Cboe
Regulators globally are continuing to pile the pressure on exchanges to maintain the stability and resilience of the financial markets, particularly as regards their communications during times of uncertainty.
So far this year, up to 50 customers were affected by Nasdaq matching engine outage in March, while more recently in July LSEG and several other trading venues’ operations were impacted by global IT issues related to a Microsoft technology outage.
Some of the biggest hits came in the second half of 2023 – the London Stock Exchange (LSEG) experienced two outages on AIM stocks between October and December, whilst in November 2022 Nasdaq Nordic markets experienced a major outage so significant that it saw markets close without Auction.
These events are just some examples of major outages of this kind on primary exchanges over the last few years, with others including those seen on Deutsche Boerse and Euronext.
As trading disruption events at venues themselves demonstrably persist, the market is keenly aware of the fact that though prevention is of course better than cure, if these issues are seemingly destined to persist there is a real need for more efficient processes in terms of effective communications.
No longer can traders and other market participants be expected to call client to client, rely on slow message boards, and be kept guessing as crucial time slips away – evidently more structure is increasingly necessary.
Read more: ESMA publishes recommendations for trading venues in the event of a market outage
Speaking to The TRADE, FIX Trading Community’s executive director, Jim Kaye, confirmed that the industry as a whole has their attention firmly on more solid processes in the event of outages.
Addressing when communication is most important, Kaye asserted: “What we’re talking about here is more the ‘heat of battle’ type messaging, as opposed to postmortems. The idea being that these messages in theory could be fed directly into trading infrastructures, which in turn could react directly. We should be conceptualising the idea that, if you get a message from a venue about an outage, there is a plan b.”