London Stock Exchange Price Errors 'Emerged At Linux Launch'

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."

Comments

either sympathy or accusation

[DreadPirateShawn]

My heart goes out to the devs "working long hours and night shifts" to suss this out.

That being said, the line that catches my eye most is: "The fact the majority of smaller vendors were fine demonstrated that those having trouble had made mistakes." In my experience, that means one of two things:

1) The devs configuring the system didn't properly account for the sheer scale of the stress on their systems.
2) The smaller vendors took the change more seriously, and being smaller and more flexible, successfully updated their systems to interact properly with the new systems.

Or, of course, both.