ISSUE: The Stock Exchange was yesterday hit by its second outage this month, raising concerns from foreign investors and locals.PHOTO/FILE
ISSUE: The Stock Exchange was yesterday hit by its second outage this month, raising concerns from foreign investors and locals.PHOTO/FILE
Yesterday's three-hour trading halt is not a sign the stock market operator's system is overloaded after the first half of this year has seen more new listings than all of 2013, NZX chief executive Tim Bennett says.
All trading was halted half an hour into the morning session and wasinitially flagged to resume at 10.45am after a "restart to the message gateway", however on the restart, connection to participants was lost, and eventually trading was moved to the secondary market environment, which took another hour, Bennett said.
This is the stock market operator's second trading halt, and its third technical glitch, this month. It was unclear what had caused yesterday's loss of connection, and work over the weekend would establish whether the issues were interconnected, Bennett said.
The trading halt comes in a week when Serko and Gentrack joined the bourse, while Hirepool, which had been set to list next month, withdrew its initial public offer. So far this year, the NZX has had 16 new listings, including seven on the stock exchange and nine on the debt market, compared with 13 new listings last year, 10 of which were stock listings, and 12 in 2012, of which six were stock listings. Bennett said the market had the capability to handle the bigger load, and they were not the cause behind the outages.
"Our largest trading days were last year, so it is certainly not to do with system being overloaded," Bennett said.
"It's been a terrific week with two IPOs, and this is disappointing."
DeutscheCraigs chief executive Brett Shepherd, whose firm has managed several of the recent IPOs, said he didn't think the NZX's technical issues would deter companies from listing, or offshore institutions from investing in the local market.
Forsyth Barr broker David Price said the outage was noticed by foreign investors who queried the lack of trading.
