SGX says it will not re-open for the rest of Thursday after technical glitches

SINGAPORE Exchange (SGX) said on Thursday the securities market will not re-open for the rest of the day after it was hit by technical glitches and twice failed to meet self-imposed targets, leaving the market in the dark.

In an update at 4.01pm - more than four hours after trading was first suspended - the bourse operator said trading would not resume at 4pm.

This came after it confirmed at 3.21pm that order and trade executions were accurate, and that the market was to resume trading at 4pm. At that time, SGX said the market will open as per normal on Friday.

In another update just before 2pm, it said "member reconciliation files are being generated and that the securities market will not resume trading at 1400 hours". It said it would advise the market of resumption time once member reconciliation is completed.

Trading of all equities was temporarily ceased at 11.38am "due to duplicate trade confirmation messages being generated" and SGX later said "no duplicate trades were executed and the market remained orderly".

The bourse operator has also apologised for inconveniences caused.

Andrew Sullivan, managing director of sales trading with Haitong International Securities Group in Hong Kong, said in a Bloomberg report: "If they don't get it going today then people are going to be very upset.

"It obviously hurts their credibility and their reputation as being an international global market that can cope under every situation."

The report added that this is at least the second malfunction at SGX's systems in the past year and that there was a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August after a technical fault.

The last time SGX suffered major trading disruptions was in 2014.

On Dec 3 that year, the market's opening was delayed to 12.30pm because of a software glitch. Earlier on Nov 5 that same year, multiple power supply issues resulted in a three-hour trading crash that affected the derivatives trading system as well.

Last year, the Monetary of Authority of Singapore reprimanded SGX for lapses related to those two outages.