Borsa Italiana, the Italian stock exchange owned by the London Stock Exchange Group, suspended trading for almost six hours today, blaming technical issues.
The exchange’s website said that a technical issue with its price information systems was “currently under investigation” at 08.45 on 22 February. It then posted a notice at 08.56 saying that trading on the MTA (electronic equities), exchange-traded fund (ETF), SeDeX (securitised derivatives) and MOT (fixed income) markets had been suspended “due to a technical issue” which affected its DDMPlus data dissemination service.
The IDEM derivatives market was then suspended at 12.10, following a warning that the data feed may negatively affect some contracts traded.
The markets were suspended until 14.55 at which point MTA and MOT markets went into pre-auction, with ETF and SeDeX markets entering a period which allowed order deletion. Continuous trading was started at 15.30 across all markets followed by normal operation. MTA is to run its closing auction from 17.25 – 17.30 as is usual.
For FIB and MiniFIB contracts being traded on IDEM, intervention was available before opening from 15.10 until 15.15 with only orders deletion enabled – for all other contracts this function ran until 15.30. The continuous trading period then ran from 15.30 until 17.40. At 15.50 Borsa Italiana reported all systems functioning normally.
Italy saw FTSE MIB, its main index, close down 3.59% on Monday 21 February from Friday 18 February.
The London Stock Exchange Group has faced a number of technical problems over the last six months. The migration of its main London market to its new Millennium Exchange trading platform was delayed from November 2010 to February 2011, to allow members further time for testing and following an outage that occurred at its Turquoise multilateral trading facility. Turquoise had adopted the system in October 2010.