London Stock Exchange (LSE)-owned multilateral trading facility (MTF) Turquoise has experienced teething troubles with its new trading platform but market participants have praised the MTF's speedy response to the issue.
According to a spokesperson at the LSE, trading on Turquoise started at 09.15 on 5 October 2010 – an hour and 15 minutes later than normal – because of “internal network issues”.
There were also client-specific problems related to order cancel acknowledgement on Turquoise's mid-point dark book and the tick size tables used for certain trades on its integrated order book on Monday, the MTF's first day of trading on its new MillenniumIT-supplied trading platform.
According to data from rival MTF BATS Europe, Turquoise traded 1.46% of European equities across its lit and dark order books on Monday, compared to an average of 4.19% in the previous five trading days. By 15.00 on Tuesday, Turquoise's market share was 1.36%.
“We are pleased with how the migration has gone but there were some teething issues, tied to the complexity of the migration,” added the spokesperson. “In the long run customers will ultimately benefit from the faster and improved technology.”
Unlike previous outages to the LSE Group's trading venues, market participants have indicated that they were happy with the transparency of the process.
“We received information on the outage very quickly from the firms we are connected to from an smart order routing perspective,” said Betsy Anderson, head of centralised dealing at Ignis Asset Management. “There was definitely a greater awareness of where our orders were sitting, compared to previously where there wasn't as much clarity.”