Canadian exchange group TMX suffered an outage yesterday, with trading suspended for nearly two hours as technical difficulties disrupted the transition from the pre-open session to the market opening.
The problem, which affected symbols beginning with M to Z, was rectified by 11.00 and trading resumed at 11.15. TMX Select, the group’s alternative trading system targeted at high-frequency traders, was unaffected by the outage, as was the group’s TSX Venture Exchange, which specialises in small and medium enterprises.
“TMX Group regrets this unfortunate and rare disruption to our normal market operations and the inconvenience caused to our customers,” said Tom Kloet, TMX Group CEO. “We are continuing to investigate the root cause to ensure that the problem does not recur.”
The outage came on the same day that the proposed acquisition of TMX by Maple Group, a consortium of 13 Canadian financial institutions, was called into serious question by Canada’s competition regulator, which said it had “serious concerns” about the deal. Market participants have already expressed concern that the Maple deal would create a monopoly and lead to a decline in trading performance.
Canadian regulators are currently reviewing the Maple transaction, with a final decision from the country’s provincial regulators in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia expected in early 2012.