The Swiss stock exchange was plagued by technical issues on Friday morning, leading to a delay in access to some of the most commonly traded markets of up to 3 hours- the latest in a series of technical glitches, giving rise to calls for more robust trading infrastructure across the industry as a response to growing trade volumes.
Trading on the SIX Swiss Exchange was subject to a lengthy delay on Friday morning, following a significant technical issue which affected trading across some of the country’s largest companies and most heavily traded derivatives.
The delays affected trading until the afternoon, causing prompts from some for investment in more technically robust systems to deal with increasing volumes and trading complexities. The interruption is one of countless incidents over the last year, as existing frameworks groan under the weight of increased volumes of trading.
The SIX exchange trades around 65% of Swiss blue-chip companies, and represents large volumes of trade in some of the countries most heavily traded markets. The failure comes just weeks after its nearest competitor for Swiss and Europe-wide trading, BATS Chi-X Europe, suffered a blackout lasting almost a full trading day.
Some sectors of the investment community have called for a review of the trading systems used by exchanges in a bid to prevent similar incidents from happening in future. As connections to the markets become more heavily trafficked and the volume of trades across electronic systems increases, the need for more resilient systems looks set to increase further in order to meet the capacity demands of the financial markets.
The SIX exchange has targeted growth in emerging markets, including across the Nordic region, which has helped shore up market share against rising competition from its European rivals.