Glitch Forces Turquoise To Suspend Trading
June 15, 2009
A software coding error caused London-based Turquoise, the bank-backed alternative equity trading venue, to suspend trading for several hours on June 10.
Turquoise runs a hybrid trading model: it accepts both dark orders--where prices are not displayed--and public or lit orders. Trading was shut down between 8:26 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. London time for trading after members experienced technical issues related to what Turquoise, a pan-European platform, called a "complex dark order matching scenario."
A spokesman for Turquoise would not comment on the exact nature of the technical glitch, but Jan Arpi, chief executive of Cinnober Financial Technology, the Stockholm-based provider of the trading platform, confirmed that his trading platform was to blame. Turquoise's trading system is based on Cinnober's TRADExpress platform.
"The error was related to a bug in our software which prevented one trade in the dark pool from being executed," he told Securities Industry News. "The trading scenario with the dark pool was outside the scope of what we had tested before Turquoise was launched and won't occur again because we have done some recoding."
Turquoise's outage marked the second time the multilateral trading facility had been plagued by systems failure. In September 2008, just weeks after its launch, Turquoise was also shut down for several hours after network and firewall related problems affected its data center. Some brokers were unable to trade for several hours before a back-up system kicked in.
