London Stock Exchange Trading Derailed by Computer Crash
September 8th, 2008This is… very interesting. Not in a good way.
Via: Telegraph:
Trading on the London Stock Exchange has been halted after a computer system failed on one of the most frantic days of trading so far this year.
In an embarrassment for the LSE, the exchange said that no orders can be entered or executions of those trades occur. The LSE plans to bring back trading in a “controlled way’’, but couldn’t say how long that will take.
The computer crash left the exchange’s customers fuming on a day of heavy trading following the US government’s bail-out of mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Traders said the exchange was suffering an ‘overloading’ caused partly because the FTSE 100 ended down sharply on Friday so traders who were betting on further falls in the index would have to close their positions.
Simon Denham, founder of Capital Spreads, said; “It (trading) went down at 8.44 am. This happens on the LSE two or three times a year, but I can’t remember it ever having been down this long.
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“I don’t know what excuse they will give – for the second biggest stock exchange in the world it’s pretty poor.”
The FTSE 100 had surged more than 3pc before trading was halted, following an earlier rally across Asia, on hopes that the nationalisation of America’s two biggest mortgage lenders may help revive the troubled US housing market.
Apparently they adopted Microsoft database technology.
NYSE Trojan?