Trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was delayed for the second time in two weeks yesterday, when an unknown technical hitch caused trading to be halted just after the market opened.
On 12 July, the bourse opened an hour-and-a-half later after a technical issue with its international connectivity. The root cause of that outage has yet to be made public.
The JSE usually opens for trading at 9am; however, yesterday the bourse was unable to properly open for equity trading until 3pm. This is only the fourth incidence of trading being halted for technical reasons in the last two years.
Although the market opened as usual at 9am, trade was halted at 9.05am due to technical problems on the cash equities market. The bourse is still investigating the issue.
As a result, trading hours were extended to 6pm, but the outage resulted in about a third fewer trades being executed. The number of trades on the JSE yesterday was 69 499, while the average daily number of trades for the first five months of 2010 was 99 128.
About two years ago, on 14 July 2008, the market only started trading just after 3pm. Trading hours were extended to 7pm after a network issue resulted in public data for the equities markets not being disseminated to all JSE customers.
On 8 September 2008, trade was halted at 10.24am due to a technical connectivity problem experienced by the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The technical problem was due to the LSE experiencing connectivity issues, which affected both the London and Johannesburg markets.
In September last year, the bourse had a power outage at its data centre. The outage meant some people had difficulty connecting to the market.
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