Singapore Exchange malfunction ruins CEO's first anniversary

It's safe to say this isn't how Loh Boon Chye pictured his one-year anniversary as chief executive officer of Singapore Exchange. Not only was Southeast Asia's biggest bourse forced to halt stock trading at 11:38 a.m. local time on Thursday because of a technical malfunction, it failed to follow through on two pledges to restart the market. SGX, which missed targets to reopen at 2 pm and 4 pm, said trading would remain closed for the rest of the day.

Loh, who took over at SGX on July 14, 2015, replaced Magnus Bocker only a few months after the Swede was forced into a public apology in the wake of two trading halts at SGX in the space of a month. Those mishaps led to a reprimand from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The latest halt is at least the second malfunction at SGX in the past year, after a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August.

"Given the change in CEO and that this has happened again, there may be a bigger problem facing SGX and its back-end systems," said Bernard Aw, a market strategist at IG Asia Pte.

An SGX spokeswoman referred requests for comment to the five statements the exchange sent on the issue.

Singapore Exchange is home to Southeast Asia's largest stock market, with total capitalisation in the city of $494 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. About S$1.6 billion ($1.2 billion) of shares changed hands on an average day in the past 12 months. The exchange maintains a monopoly on stock trading in Singapore.

Among the equities halted were DBS Group Holdings and Singapore Airlines.

"This should have been sorted as it happened a few years back as well," said Alex Wijaya, a senior sales trader at CMC Markets. "The communication and handling of this incident could have been better."

SGX isn't alone in suffering from technical errors. Malfunctions at Deutsche Boerse AG, Europe's biggest derivatives exchange, disrupted trading in February and July 2015.

While there was a one-hour halt in trading on Euronext NV's derivatives products in March last year.

The New York Stock Exchange had an outage a year ago that lasted 3 and half hours.

"It's unforeseen and nobody likes this," said Melinda Sam, chief executive officer of the Securities Association of Singapore. "We just hope that SGX can improve on the technology."