Background story
SGX chief executive Magnus Bocker has suggested that some bad luck was involved, but the SGX is not alone in suffering IT malfunctions. The London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse have all had their share of IT woes.
CAI JIN
Has SGX's system become too unwieldy?
Safeguards failed to prevent IT glitches; thorough review is in order
Published on Dec 8, 2014 12:51 AM
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Given the complexities of SGX's trading system, merely combing all the processes to find the cause of the latest fault may be insufficient and not result in a foolproof way to prevent future glitches. -- PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI FOR THE STRAITS TIMES
By Goh Eng Yeow Senior Correspondent
TIME was that it took a war to close a stock exchange.
Not anymore. Now all it takes is a technical glitch - and there have been a few examples here recently.
On Nov 5, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) suffered the ignominy of having to close for trading for three hours when a bolt of lightning, which lasted barely 0.1 second, shut down both its securities and derivatives trading systems.
Before the ink could dry on the findings of the inquiry into what went wrong, the exchange had to delay the opening of its securities market by more than three hours last week after a software glitch caused a mess with end-client reports generated for brokerages.
So far, the damage appears reputational. There has been no news of big losses - only complaints of missed profit-making opportunities - and no panic among investors who trade on the SGX.
But unless the problems are licked, the SGX may not be so lucky next time. In the United States, Nasdaq's reputation and revenues are still suffering from the disastrous public offering of Facebook in 2012 when computer glitches produced an estimated US$500 million (S$661 million) worth of errant trades. Nasdaq had to pay US$62 million in compensation for the botched trades.
SGX chief executive Magnus Bocker has suggested that some bad luck was involved, but the SGX is not alone in suffering IT malfunctions. The London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse have all had their share of IT woes.
To understand why stock exchanges are seeing more technical glitches, we have to turn to a report issued by Standard & Poor's last year.
One problem it flags is that stock exchanges are making big investments in new trading technologies to enable them to trade faster and process millions of transactions daily.
It notes that such tech advances increase the complexity of the exchanges' trading systems, and amplify the impact of operational glitches when they occur.
Seen in this light, SGX may have sown the seeds of its problem with its relentless quest for speed, having spent $250 million three years ago on a state-of-the-art trading engine which can do transactions 3,000 times faster than the blink of an eye.
Also, some market pundits suggest that the increasingly sophisticated defences which stock exchanges use to ring-fence themselves against hacker attacks may also make them more prone to breakdowns, since this makes their trading systems more complex and difficult to handle.
What is worrying in SGX's case is that the malfunctions occurred despite stringent safeguards put in place.
Its Nov 5 shutdown occurred even though it had installed four layers of protection against power supply disruption.
Worse, last week's stoppage was due to a software upgrade on an unrelated part of its IT infrastructure which caused the "client accounting system" used to generate client reports for brokerages to malfunction.
It must make one wonder if the SGX's trading system has become so unwieldy that a software team working to fix a problem in one area may inadvertently create a glitch elsewhere, despite following all safety guidelines.
This being so, merely combing all the processes to find the cause of the latest fault may be insufficient and may not result in a foolproof way to prevent future glitches, given the complexities of the trading system.
Perhaps it is time for the SGX and its regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, to do a complete review of the SGX's trading system - and possibly its business model.
If need be, an independent committee should be set up to offer a fresh perspective which may have been overlooked by the previous board of inquiry.
The SGX is the public face of Singapore's financial centre, and if operational glitches persist, investor confidence will be affected and some may choose to take their money elsewhere.
Given its two breakdowns in a row, the SGX should strive for "zero tolerance" of technical glitches, just like airlines and hospitals.
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