In the aftermath of its recent epic hacking, Reuters decided to take down its in house blogs. Few people noticed, and from what we hear they are still down. However, when Reuters' 3000 - the firm's FX trading platform: "one of the two key systems used by currency traders around the world, experienced an outage Tuesday, according to several market participants" goes down, and has yet to come up, we can only hope that someone has paid attention unless FX trading is also now thoroughly dominated by algos as well) to a market which transacts to the tune of several trillions in notional every day. But perhaps most interesting is that the "break" occurred at precisely 3:13 pm, at just the moment when the accelerating selloff in the EURUSD, and thus the broad market, could have caused quite a headache for those whose reelection chances are dependent on the S&P being as high as possible heading into November.
From Dow Jones [4]:
Thomson Reuters Corp.'s electronic trading platform, one of the two key systems used by currency traders around the world, experienced an outage Tuesday, according to several market participants.
The trading system, named Reuters 3000, went out at 3:13 p.m. EDT (1913 GMT), said Michael Lavina, head of trading at Faros Trading, and has hadn't come back online as of 4:08 p.m EDT.
A representative for Thomson Reuters wasn't immediately available for comment.
During the outage, traders at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. said they were routing their trades through EBS, the other major currency platform.
In the most recent data available, the electronic currencies-dealing system run by Thomson Reuters consolidated its lead ahead over main rival EBS in July, with its average daily volume outstripping those of its main rival for the 10th straight month.
In July, Thomson Reuters said it had handled an average of $130 billion of trading volumes per day, a 10% fall from June and a 14% drop from the same time last year. But flows were still higher than those on EBS, which saw an average of $106.7 billion per day in the same month--22% below the previous month and some 41% lower on the year.
Now bear with us here - Reuters 3000 went offline at 3:13 pm Eastern. Spot at precisely what point the EURUSD, which as everyone knows, is the main driver for ES, for broad risk, and for the market in general, reverses its downward trend and starts creeping higher as if controlled by your run of the mill Knight Capital algos...
[5]
Going forward, do assorted markets literally have to break every single time broad risk needs a helping invisible hand higher?