Euronext examining glitches on derivatives contracts

Pan-European financial markets operator Euronext said on Thursday that it was investigating technical glitches which had affected its index derivatives.

Euronext, which runs the Paris, Milan and Amsterdam stock markets among others, said index derivatives contracts had been suspended, although trading in other areas was not affected and proceeding as normal.

The glitches come at a sensitive time for the market operator, which controls nearly a quarter of the equity trading flow in Europe after its successful acquisition of Borsa Italiana last year.

The outage in index derivatives trading is the second in less than a year and comes after a major disruption in October 2020 to trading from Dublin to Paris forced traders to sit on the sidelines for hours.

When outages hit U.S. markets, investors can seamlessly migrate their trading on other exchanges, but Europe does not have any back up system at a time when major European bourses are on a consolidation mode.

Euronext operates six major stock markets in Europe. While trading of stocks can also be done on other platforms such as Cboe Europe, Aquis and Turquoise, traders generally use Euronext as the reference market.

In a paper published in May, Cboe Europe and Aquis Exchange proposed an industry-wide plan to respond to primary market outages, which would see them handle much of the process following a glitch.

European cash share trading was relatively unaffected with major European bourses fell broadly in line with world markets.