London equities trading opens one hour late after 'technical issue'

The London Stock Exchange Group Plc said a software issue was to blame for a one-hour delay to its opening auction on Thursday, the first major outage of its kind in seven years.
 
Regular trading on LSE commenced at 9 am UK time after the opening auction was postponed due to a “technical software issue” that has been resolved, the exchange said. The 217-year-old bourse operates one of Europe’s largest cash equity markets. LSE’s main equity market and Alternative Investment Market were among those affected.

“To preserve the integrity of the market and to ensure orderly trading, LSE decided to delay the market open while the matter was investigated and informed market participants accordingly,” a spokeswoman said by email.

 

Some traders were left frustrated by the delayed open and said market operators should have better back-up plans in place. “There should be some other mechanism that allows it to be counteracted,” said Atif Latif, director of trading at Guardian Stockbrokers in London. “On a heavy dividend day, we had to gauge prices based on the European market and index futures.”