The London Stock Exchange had a delayed start to trading of nearly two hours on Friday morning due to technical problems.
While the exact cause of the problem is yet unknown, normal trading commenced at 9:40am, rather than the usual 8am start for the UK stock market. The LSE said a technical software issue was thought to be behind the outage.
AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said that “investors would have been yearning for a quiet Friday after a week of turmoil for the markets driven by recession fears".
Social media reaction was quick to link the LSE's technical problems with last Friday's Nationional Grid outage, which led to power cuts and severe disruption to train services
But Darius McDermott, managing director at Chelsea Financial Services, says that "it's a bit of stretch to say Britain's falling apart" after Friday's outage at the exchange. He described it as a "minor inconvenience" for most market participants, but he said the bigger asset managers with many more orders to fill would have found it more disruptive.
The FTSE 100 bounced at the delayed open, rising just under 1% to 7,120 points. But it’s been a volatile period for the main index, which has fallen from a 2019 high of just under 7,700 points at the end of July as global markets have turned sharply lower over recession fears.
The glitch affected trading in FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 stocks, the LSE said. The last trading outage was for an hour, in June 2018, which affected an entire range of stocks, from FTSE 100 shares to small caps. An IT upgrade at the exchange triggered a four-hour outage in 2011.
Even though trading volumes are usually lower at this time of year, traders are in anxious mood as bond yields in the US and the UK have inverted, which usually signals recession.
One day this week the Dow Jones plunged 800 points in one trading session.