‘Technical issues’ abruptly halt trading on TSX

TORONTO — Trading abruptly ended early Thursday on the Toronto Stock Exchange and several other TMX Group Ltd. markets after the company suspended the exchanges because of what it says were technical issues.

The trading halts, which came a little over than two hours before the scheduled close, came on another day of sharp losses on fears of the novel coronavirus’s effect on global economic growth.

The TSX fell as much as 585 points and was down 325 points, or 1.9 per cent, when it was halted, while U.S. markets fell more than four per cent.

The company said it halted the markets because clients were unable to enter, modify or cancel open orders on TSX, TSXV and Alpha exchanges, and it had also halted its derivatives-focused Montreal Exchange.

“TMX continues to investigate the problem with order entry on TSX, TSXV and Alpha. We apologize for the inconvenience,” the company said in a statement.

The company halted trading on its exchanges shortly before 2 p.m. and confirmed at 3:17 p.m. that they would remain closed for the day. It has not yet said when the exchanges will reopen.

TMX previously closed its Toronto Stock Exchange early on April 27, 2018, because of internal technical issues, and reopened the market on the next trading day.

The 2018 incident was caused by a hardware failure in a central storage appliance of the trading system, the company said.

At the time, then company CEO Lou Eccleston said the company was committed to applying the lessons learned from this incident to help it prevent such issues from recurring in the future.