The Tokyo Stock Exchange is to scrap its market information and equities trading systems and bring in new higher capacity systems following an investigation into service interruptions that occured in July.
The TSE executed an "emergency increase of systems capabilities" immediately following a failure in price dissemination this Summer, allocating extra capacity on the primary Cores system for convertible bonds and futures and options trading. The Exchange has since moved to replace the present CPU and in March next year will have re-organised systems programming, effectively doubling data throughput rates to 9000 transmissions per minute for equities.
Trading volumes at the TSE soared in the summer months, rising to two million orders per day, from 1.3 million a year earlier. In October, the main equities trading system executed a trade despite the fact that no buy order had been placed.
At a meeting earlier this week, the TSE Board gave the go-ahead for the implementation of a replacement market information and equities trading system at a total cost of Y8 billion. The new pricing system will increase data transmission capabilities to 17,000 per minute and will be implemented in April 2005, a month before the scheduled introduction of a higher-grade stock trading system.