A system “incident” halted trading in hundreds of shares on the London Stock Exchange.
The outage affected mostly smaller-cap equities, but included several high-profile names such as Asos Plc, Deliveroo Plc and Metro Bank Holdings Plc, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The halt began at about 3:10 p.m. local time.
“We are undertaking immediate analysis and will provide further updates,” London Stock Exchange Group Plc said on its website. Only stocks on the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 250 and international orderbook were available for trading, it said.
“We have been getting lots of incoming calls from clients,” said Dominic Gauld, an equity trader at Peel Hunt. “Trading has continued in some names, but activity is clearly very subdued in the impacted segments of the market.”
It’s not the first time that the UK’s main stock trading venue has suffered such a glitch. In 2019, the LSE had an outage that lasted about an hour and 40 minutes. It was also hit by a one-hour trading delay in June 2018, caused by a software issue.
--With assistance from Michael Msika and Thyagaraju Adinarayan.
(Adds time of trading halts, context around previous outages)
