London Stock Exchange Price Errors 'Emerged At Linux Launch' 168
DMandPenfold writes "Within the first 20 seconds of the London Stock Exchange's new matching engine going live on Monday, price data vendors began displaying incorrect prices, blank prices and wrong trading volumes, according to Computerworld UK sources. Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data and Netbuilder are among the largest data vendors, providing share prices to traders, that have been displaying pricing problems on some stocks throughout the week. Even the LSE's own data vendor, ProQuote, experienced problems. Concerns are being raised that there could be mistakenly setup connections or incorrect software interfaces at some of the large data vendors. Alternatively, there may be a data caching issue at the LSE that means data going out is not properly synchronised between different systems."
Re:Testing? (Score:5, Informative)
Surely they would have run test data before letting it go live. Maybe even feed it the actual data and simply not publish its results.
From TFA: "Meanwhile, the private view at the exchange is that the 15 month testing window should have been plenty of time for the vendors to interface perfectly with it."
Re:Linux fails... AGAIN (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget the US DoD, The US Navy Submarine Fleet, the FAA, and Cisco:
http://www.focus.com/fyi/information-technology/50-places-linux-running-you-might-not-expect/ [focus.com]
I don't see IBM running Watson on Windows 2008 Server because, well, you know....they want it to work.
Re:Testing? (Score:5, Informative)
From this article a couple of days earlier http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3261625/frustrations-mount-over-london-stock-exchange-data-interface-problems/ [computerworlduk.com] :
Publicly, the LSE and the data vendors say they are working together as engineers scramble to fix the price data problems, even though some statements to clients suggest elements of blame.
But behind the scenes, sources close to the several of the parties, including the exchange, told Computerworld UK they were immensely frustrated at the reputational impact of the problems.
The LSE is taking the position that its data feeds are working correctly. Industry sources said the exchange had placed a great deal of emphasis on the launch, which was largely providing successful high-speed trading, and that it had allocated sufficient time - 15 months - for the vendors to be fully prepared for the new system.
The LSE statement appeared to place some blame with the vendors. "Unfortunately a couple of market data vendors have experienced some specific issues aligning to the new Millennium Exchange platform and we are actively working with them to help resolve their issues," it said.
"All other trading customers and vendors are successfully trading on the new platform, benefiting from Millennium Exchange's superior functionality and speed."
Emphasize mine. Looks to me like the exchange is getting the flack for a couple of amateurish (or saboteurish?) vendors.
Quote Services (Score:5, Informative)
Article is a a bit misleading....
Reuters, Netbuilder et al are quote services that run externally and fetch quotes (price/volume) from the LSE and are *not* part of what would be considered the main trading platform. The problem isnt the actual OS (Linux) or tradiing platform, which has been heralded as a big step forward from the MS solution, but rather how the resulting trade data that is pushed from the exchange to the 3rd party sites and then ultimately to the end users.
Re:Quote Services (Score:2, Informative)
Article is a a bit misleading....
Reuters, Netbuilder et al are quote services that run externally and fetch quotes (price/volume) from the LSE and are *not* part of what would be considered the main trading platform. The problem isnt the actual OS (Linux) or tradiing platform, which has been heralded as a big step forward from the MS solution, but rather how the resulting trade data that is pushed from the exchange to the 3rd party sites and then ultimately to the end users.
BTW... these protocols while well documented are complicted. To get an idea, check out either the NYSE ArcaEX Direct API [nyse.com] or the NYSE Arca FIX specs [nyse.com]
If someone could point out the LSE equivalent, I'd be interested in seeing the differences
Effect on stockbrokers (Score:5, Informative)
As someone on the receiving end of this problem (as head of Development for one of the largest UK stockbrokers), it has been immensly frustrating trying to get an admission of blame from anyone involved in this issue. Our clients are complaining to use because elements of the data we're displaying on our site are just so out of whack they are laughable. In the end we've just had to remove those elements of data from our website, and they remain removed until the fix is confirmed working on Monday. This is after several attempts to fix the issues during the week.
It's also causing serious issues for things like our black box trading engine which is used to drive automatic execution of client orders when the price moves into range for execution. The data being bad means these systems just have to be turned off, and clients are being advised to simply delete their orders.
This is, frankly, a pretty appalling situation as the service to our clients is being impacted pretty severely.
For an exchange that is attempting to position itself as the true 'global' exchange, this is doing an immense amount of damage to it's reputation.