By Huw Jones
LONDON (Reuters) - Stock exchanges and other trading platforms should draw up and make public plans for dealing with outages to provide greater predictability for customers, global securities watchdog IOSCO said on Wednesday.
Exchanges worldwide have been hit by glitches and outages for various reasons, such as software changes.
A glitch at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday triggered massive swings in the shares of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa) and Barrick Gold (NYSE:GOLD), and trading halts in dozens of other companies, before the problem was fixed.
"Where trading venues have effective playbooks and outage plans in place, this provides market participants with certainty about the steps that trading venues will take in the event of an outage," IOSCO, which is comprised of regulators from across the world, said in a report.
The report highlighted "the need for improved preparedness and management of market outages to ensure market resilience and investor confidence".
Exchanges could also set out their "reopening strategies" to explain the steps taken for restarting trading and how orders will be managed, the IOSCO 'best practice' guidance said.
Trading venues that run closing auctions that determine prices used in benchmarks should also spell out what happens after an outage.
"Where a closing auction cannot be run at the scheduled time, trading venues may need to consider postponing the closing auction before cancelling it," IOSCO said.
"If the operation of a closing auction is not possible, trading venues may need to consider how to ensure the market is provided with alternative closing prices."
Exchanges could also seek feedback from users for a "lessons learnt" exercise following an outage, the watchdog said.