Why Moscow Exchange can't start working normally

Photo: Yury Martyanov / Kommersant

In September, several technical failures occurred at the Moscow Exchange, due to which the site could not enter normal operation. For example, on Monday, customers of this trading platform could not conclude transactions for about two hours due to problems with the software. This is the fourth technical failure, with the consequences in the form of suspension of trading, writes Kommersant. On Monday, problems on the Moscow Stock Exchange began at 10:25, then at 11:43 the trading was resumed again. But after two minutes, trading was again suspended, and the exchange began to work only at 12:40.

Representatives of the exchange reported that the reason for the failure was a software error “when the core of the trading system was reading the configuration”. This situation required a kernel reboot, but after the resumption of trading, some participants could not synchronize their own systems with the exchange systems, which required a second stop. The Central Bank announced that it will carefully study the information received from the Moscow Exchange on this situation. “In the event of violations, the Bank of Russia will take oversight measures,” said the Central Bank’s press service.

In this case, technically, the latter failure is very different from previous ones. The fact is that in previous cases, the trades simply stopped when certain problems occurred. And on Monday, transactions continued to be carried out even during a contingency. “From the morning on the derivatives market, transactions were made at prices that do not have a market rationale,” said Mikhail Khanov, deputy director of IT Invest.
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“Due to the fact that the old orders were not executed, the new orders were automatically placed higher, which led to a sharp jump in the futures contracts quotes,” a source at a large Russian broker commented on the situation.

“The real deals were deviated from the market prices, and someone made a profit because of this, and someone made an unplanned loss,” said the deputy general director for active operations of Veles Capital, Yevgeny Shilenkov.

Sergey Polyakov, Managing Director of Information Technology at the Moscow Stock Exchange, believes that those who have failed have nothing to do with a significant load on the system. In this case, three previous failures were due to problems with the hardware. Now the exchange is implementing a modernization program, providing for the annual replacement of 30% of the fleet of servers and 20% of network equipment. Also, “transformations are being carried out in the general configuration of trading systems, which should significantly limit the affected area in emergency situations due to the separation of monolithic trading systems into separate trading and clearing modules,” Mr. Polyakov notes.