Tokyo Stock Exchange halts trading due to ‘technical glitch’
Tokyo, Oct 1 (efe-epa).- The Tokyo Stock Exchange suspended trading in all shares on Thursday due to a technical problem, the corporation that operates the exchange announced.
“As a technical glitch occurred to distribution of market data, TSE is halting trading of all listed symbols today,” Japan Exchange Group said in a statement.
The group said that it did not know when trading will resume, adding that it will provide further information on Friday’s session later.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato described the suspension of trading as “extremely regrettable.”
The Financial Services Agency has asked the operator and the exchange to take steps to determine the cause of the error and to restore the system, Kato said.
The announcement that trading was suspended came minutes before the opening of Japan’s main stock exchange, which closed on Wednesday with a 1.5 percent drop in its benchmark index, Nikkei.
The fault affects the system that distributes data such as market prices and is used to calculate the indices of the exchange, which has therefore decided to freeze trading of all shares and to stop accepting new orders, the Japan Exchange Group said.
The exchange’s after-hours trading systems also halted operations, the group added.
Bourses in Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo, which use the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s system, also suspended their operations on Thursday until further notice.
Trading at the Osaka Exchange, which uses a different system, was not affected and proceeded normally.
Shares of a total of 3,700 listed companies are traded in the various sections of the Tokyo exchange, which is the third largest stock market in the world in terms of capitalization.
Thursday’s suspension is the first since 2005, when trading was halted for more than four hours due to a failed system upgrade.
More recently, in 2012, Japan’s main stock market had to stop trading in shares of some companies on at least two occasions because of a failure of its backup systems.
Since 2010, the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been using a system developed with Fujitsu, which is also “currently checking the situation,” a spokesperson told the Nikkei financial daily. EFE-EPA
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