Futures traders, broking houses and investment banks face potential losses this morning when the ASX trading platform reopens after a crippling meltdown on Monday.
The ASX infrastructure survived only 40 minutes of trading in the morning session before glitches associated with a software upgrade wiped out trading for the rest of the day.
The epic operational failure intensified concerns among market participants of the effectiveness of risk management within the ASX organisation ahead of its plan to replace its existing CHESS trading platform with a blockchain system in the next two years.
It also left independent traders and trading desks at leading investment banks sweating over options and futures positions that were due to mature yesterday before market activity ended abruptly.
One independent trader known as “Dan” optimistically pleaded on Twitter for the ASX to resume trading this morning at Monday’s closing prices:
“So ASX, what are you proposing to do to the thousands of customers/traders that are going to be financially impacted by your incompetence? Re-opening trading from current prices & market depth would be the only fair & reasonable outcome.”
The big worry for options traders is that they might be forced to wear losses on positions that were “in the money” at the time the platform crashed.
If the bullish sentiment that dominated the truncated ASX session was reversed by a negative turn on international markets then former winning positions could be upended when the market reopens today.
Even if that doesn’t occur, global investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and many others are likely to be scrambling to mend askew risk management within their prime broking operations that provide credit lines to hedge funds.
Prime brokers typically manage their risks on lending to hedge funds by matching the equity-related derivatives positions taken by their clients with a physical position in stocks.
One of the country’s most seasoned market observers – retired stockbroker Ivor Ries - said the outage meant that prime broking arms of investment banks were prevented from doing that for most of Monday.
“One day is probably not a disaster,” he said.
“But it sure makes managing a derivatives book and prime broking exposures very difficult.
“There will be open positions everywhere across investment banks at the moment and that raises systemic risk because these banks have not been able to net off positions.
“Until the market reopens they can’t manage risks effectively.”
Dr Patrick McConnell, an operational risk expert and prominent critic of the ASX’s approach to technology governance said the outage would renew scrutiny of the market operator’s plan to replace the CHESS trading system with an unproven blockchain platform.
“This outage does not augur well for the technology governance of the ASX proposal to replace the CHESS system,” he said.
“As I understand it, this outage occurred even though they had spent 12 months testing a software upgrade of the CHESS system.
“Their technology governance is not of the best.”
McConnell said he was also concerned about the opaque regulation of the ASX which is shared between ASIC and the Reserve Bank.
The RBA oversees the ASX because it has responsibility for financial market infrastructure while ASIC is the market regulator.
“Basically, the two regulators are falling over each other,” McConnell said.
“I’ve never understood why ASIC is also monitoring the technology of the ASX because I don’t think it has the skill set to properly regulate financial market technology.”
Ries said the CHESS system continued to be the cheapest equities execution platform in the world and that market participants were questioning the logic of switching to a blockchain platform.
“ I think that the sentiment of market participants towards replacing CHESS is mostly neutral or negative,” he said.
“The blockchain system will require major investments by market participants in computing power – it is incredibly energy intensive.”
ASX managing director Dominic Stevens last night apologised for the disruption caused to investors and market participants but reiterated the company’s commitment to overhaul its technology.
“Notwithstanding the extensive testing and rehearsals, and the involvement of our technology provider, ASX accepts responsibility,” he said.
“While I am disappointed with today’s outage, we are determined to continue our program of contemporising ASX’s technology stack from top to bottom.”
Stevens said the technology overhaul was critical to ASX building “an exchange for the future” and ensuring it best served the needs of customers.