Everything is screwed up in Singapore? LKY must be rolling in his death bed!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Latest Singapore Outage Adds Pressure on Exchange
Central Bank, Market Regulator Slam Third Outage This Year

Singapore’s stock exchange experienced its third trading outage this year, a blow to confidence in a bourse that is already suffering falling trading volumes and attracting criticism from authorities.

The delay in the market’s open Wednesday was immediately slammed by the central bank and market regulator, which called it “unacceptable.” The Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement it had instructed Singapore Exchange Ltd. , or SGX, to review “the shortcomings that led to the lapse” and would “not hesitate to take supervisory actions” if necessary.

SGX said it deliberately delayed the open by more than three hours to allow brokers to reconcile their systems after incorrect data were sent by a back-office system because of a software update over the weekend. Brokers use data from the system to create contracts and manage ledgers for their customers.

It is the second time in as many months that SGX has suffered technical problems and drawn criticism from the market regulator and investors. A technical glitch in the exchange’s systems halted trading in both securities and derivatives markets for more than two hours on Nov. 5., and in April the derivatives market was halted for around 2½ hours because of unspecified hardware trouble.

Such frequent interruptions are “not good for the confidence of the market,” said David Gerald, president and chief executive of the Securities Investors’ Association (Singapore). “SGX needs to address this problem urgently to avoid a recurrence, especially in this period of low market volume,” he said.

The bourse operator is struggling to rekindle interest in its securities market, which has failed to attract any big-ticket listings since Asian Pay Television Trust raised nearly 1.4 billion Singapore dollars (US$1.1 billion) in May last year.

Securities trading volume in the three months to Sept. 30 was 1.8 billion shares, down 10% from the previous quarter, according to SGX data, although data for November were improved from the year-earlier month. Net profit for the quarter fell 16% from a year earlier to S$77.6 million.

The latest trading outage could set the exchange back further. “The impact on confidence is just an enhancement to the bad image of SGX,” said Jimmy Ho, president of the Society of Remisiers (Singapore), an association of stock dealers and brokers.

The bourse reopened trading at 12:30 p.m. local time. The benchmark FTSE Straits Times Index ended Wednesday down 0.6% at 3303.39, with trading volume at 75% of its rolling five-day average.

SGX Chief Executive Magnus Bocker said the outage was unconnected to previous incidents this year. He said the exchange would have to rebuild trust and would do everything it could to ensure that no more interruptions take place. “Nothing is more important than to have an orderly, fair, transparent market,” he said, emphasizing that the delayed open was to ensure all participants had fair and equal access to the market.

“I just think it is a string of bad luck,” Kevin Foy, director, global head of sales trading at Maybank Kim Eng Securities , said of SGX’s latest outage. “They’re trying to get their ship in order.”

The exchange has made several updates to its systems in recent months in an attempt to improve trading volumes and boost liquidity after the Stock Exchange of Thailand surpassed it in securities trading volume.

It has also introduced circuit breakers and other market mechanisms to better regulate trading and restore confidence following a so-called “flash crash” in small-capitalization stocks, but trading volume remains low compared with other markets in the region. Many of the country’s largest listed companies count the government as their largest shareholder, and the city has struggled to attract sizable listings from abroad.

SGX’s downtime underscores technological challenges faced by many major exchanges, which have had several outages in recent years. The New York Stock Exchange, for example, was forced to transfer operations to its disaster recovery center in Chicago in October after a problem, while in June a technical issue prevented trading in billions of euros of futures contracts on NYSE Liffe.

Write to Gaurav Raghuvanshi at [email protected] and Jake Maxwell Watts at [email protected]


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