‘It Is Unacceptable’: Investors React to Toronto Exchange Outage
A 40-minute outage across three stock exchanges stalled equity trading in Canada, leaving some investors frustrated and others refusing to place orders even after it reopened.
Trading was halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture and Alpha markets around 10:30 a.m. New York time and resumed at 11:10 a.m. All three exchanges are owned by TMX Group Ltd., which stopped trading due to a connection problem that affected order entries. The exchange sent its first notice that it was having trouble shortly after 10 a.m.
“It is a software-related issue, it is not hardware, it is not cyber-related,” TMX Group CEO John McKenzie said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. “We have identified what it is and we are working to get around it.” He apologized to clients for the trading halt and for “not meeting their expectations and not meeting our expectations.” Shares of TMX Group closed 1.3% lower Tuesday.
McKenzie said the company made the decision to halt trading in an attempt to fix the problem and migrated operations to a disaster recovery backup site, marking the first time the exchange has used that system.
“I feel like I'm trading on a third world exchange,” said Eric Nuttall, partner and senior portfolio manager at Ninepoint Partners. “I have multiple orders for $20 million to $40 million that I cannot execute. It is unacceptable,” he added during the trading halt.
Laura Lau, chief investment officer at Toronto-based Brompton Funds, said she decided not to trade on the Canadian exchange for the rest of the day because the bourse had yet to explain what caused the problem. “I don't want to execute now,” she said.
Lau likened the “very disruptive” trading halt Tuesday to a recent network breakdown by Rogers
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