10/28/2011 - Australian Exchange Operates Without a Glitch

October 28, 2011
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

The Australian Securities Exchange operated normally on Friday, executing nearly twice as many trades as on Thursday.

The exchange, in its last day as the only marketplace down under for trading in shares listed in Australia, carried out 844,411 equity trades.

That compares to 436,077 carried out the day before – when trading was shut down for four hours due to a technical glitch that kept traders from connecting to the exchange.

Neither the ASX nor its technology provider, Nasdaq OMX Group, had further comment on the cause of Thursday’s outage. They continue to look for a root cause.

Eleven months ago, ASX moves its trading platform, ASX Trade, onto Nasdaq OMX’s Genium INET “next-generation” trading system that can handle orders in under 100 millionths of a second.
In the ASX case, the latency on executing orders was cut from 30 thousandths of a second in 2008 to 300 millionths, at the outset in December 2010.

The near-doubling of equities trading essentially made up for the drop on Thursday, which was expected to be buoyant upon the announcement of a deal to stem the European debt crisis.
And even with the four-hour outage, volume in options contracts on Thursday was near normal.

"When trading came back on, ASX was at pains to explain to me they did something close to the normal day's training in the remaining two hours - it was about $4.3 billion and a large volume of options was sorted," Financial Services Minister Bill Shorten said, according to The Australian.
Thursday’s outage was the second in the 11 months that ASX Trade has been operating on Genium INET technology.

The exchange experienced a 90-minute outage in February.

Chi-X Australia, part of Chi-X Global and backed by GETCO, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, opens for trading on Monday. Chi-X operates all-electronic, high-speed alternative venues in Canada and Japan, as well.

Its Chi-Tech unit supplies technology services to its exchange operations. Nasdaq OMX took the INET technology it acquired in 2005 from Instinet and markets it to exchanges around the world, such as the ASX.

Instinet, now largely an agency-only broker serving institutional traders, is a pioneer in the off-exchange electronic trading of stocks, dating back to 1967. Its name is a contraction of Institutional Networks.

Instinet is the founder of Chi-X Global and its largest shareholder.
Chi-X uses technology developed after Instinet sold its original INET technology to Nasdaq.

 http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/asx-nasdaq-no-glitch-last-day-29454-1.html?ET=securitiesindustry:e2969:185251a:&st=email&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=STM_BNA_08302010_102811