A system “incident” halted trading in hundreds of shares on the London Stock Exchange for the final 80 minutes of Thursday’s session.
(Bloomberg) — A system “incident” halted trading in hundreds of shares on the London Stock Exchange for the final 80 minutes of Thursday’s session.
The outage affected mostly smaller-cap equities, but included several high-profile names such as Asos Plc, Deliveroo Plc and Metro Bank Holdings Plc, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Stocks on the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 250 and international orderbook weren’t affected, London Stock Exchange Group Plc said on its website.
The halt led to “very subdued” trading in the impacted segments of the market, said Dominic Gauld, an equity trader at stock broker Peel Hunt.
The LSE said the affected stocks didn’t go through an end-of-day auction, a particularly important event for passive investors and fund managers who benchmark the closing price. Exchange-traded funds mostly trade at the close to track final prices.
Closing prices were published 30 minutes later than usual, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
It’s not the first time that the UK’s main stock trading venue has suffered such a glitch. In 2019, the LSE had an outage that lasted about an hour and 40 minutes. It was also hit by a one-hour trading delay in June 2018, caused by a software issue.
–With assistance from Michael Msika and William Shaw.
(Adds statement on closing auction in third paragraph)
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