LSE - Yet another system crash

(Financial Times 2009-11-27) The London Stock Exchange yesterday suffered the double humiliation of being hit by a three-hour trading outage and seeing a sharp drop in its share price as investors fretted over the status of its largest, Dubai-based shareholder.

The halting of its trading system, caused by what the LSE said was "connectivity problems" was the biggest since its system collapsed for eight hours over a year ago.

[...]

The LSE's share of trading in FTSE 100 stocks has fallen below 60 per cent as nimbler platforms such as Chi-X Europe, Turquoise and US-based BATS Europe have offered cheaper and faster trading.

M Rolet said: "We regret the inconvenience that today's disruption to trading has caused for our clients.

"Having resolved the immediate issue, we are working hard to ensure this doesn't happen again."

The LSE recently bought MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan trading technology company whose systems will replace the LSE's current trading systems early next year.

The LSE said "connectivity issues" had affected two of the "gateways" into the exchange's order books that are used by traders. It put the market into an "auction" mode, where trades are left but cannot be executed.

However, it was not clear whether trading had migrated to rival platforms such as Chi-X Europe and BATS Europe as a result of the outage.

[...]

However Chi-X, controlled by broker Instinet, accused the LSE of preventing orders shifting to other platforms by imposing the auction.

I have been posting about the LSE technology issues for quite some time now, and people interested in my take on that, along with the long brewing story of they failure can read the previous posts below:

• 2009-11-09 Technical incident on the London Stock Exchange (again!)
• 2009-10-07 LSE buys MillenniumIT, moves to Linux/Solaris
• 2009-07-10 Quick follow-up on the LSE - Microsoft fiasco
• 2009-07-05 LSE-Microsoft: what was meant to happen happened

My short answer is that their problems does not result from technological issues but from complete lack of competencies when it comes to managing technology projects and systems. I do hope for them that their acquisition of this Sri Lankan company will solve their issues, but it's unsure for me that actually is going to happen. Wait & Pray