Euronext resolves mix up of buy and sell orders on trades struck on Tuesday

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – Exchange operator Euronext said that there was mix up of buy and sell orders on a number of trades struck on Tuesday and later told Reuters that the issue was resolved by Wednesday evening as it battled to handle trading glitches after a huge outage earlier this week.

“It has been identified that some of the 19/10 trades sent yesterday to the CCPs (central counterparty clearing house) had the wrong buy/sell direction”, Euronext said earlier on Wednesday.

“Reverse trades will be sent after trading hours in order to neutralize the error”, it added.

“The issue is now solved”, the company said in an emailed statement late on Wednesday.

A series of glitches on Monday disrupted several of Western Europe’s major stock exchanges and raised concerns about the risk of one operator hosting so many bourses.

The outage was at least the fifth major one globally this year and one of the most widespread as exchange operator Euronext hosts stocks exchanges from Dublin and Amsterdam to Paris and Lisbon. It operates six major stock markets in Europe.

Trading in those locations came to standstill for more than three hours on Monday morning due to a technical failure impacting one of its data management systems. Though it was resolved in the afternoon, it came back during closing auctions.

The outage was concerning for Euronext which is planning a major expansion through a 4.3 billion euro ($5.10 billion) deal to buy Borsa Italiana from London Stock Exchange .

Euronext will operate exchanges with more than 1,800 listed companies and an aggregate market value of around 4.4 trillion euros after the Borsa Italiana deal.

($1 = 0.8433 euros)

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Marguerita Choy)