Houdini Markets & Election Interventionism: Reuters’ 3000 Currency Trading Platform Goes Down
“…And it’s gone…” again. The “invisible hand of the markets” is beginning to look like the hologram resurrection of 2pac at Coachella, only instead of the deceased rapper, we’re getting Houdini.
Reuters’ 3000, “one of the two key systems used by currency traders around the world, experienced an outage Tuesday, according to several market participants.” By 4:08EDT, the system had yet to come up. The market transacts several trillions in notional each day. The system went down at around 3:13 pm on a day when the EURUSD saw increased selloff as the NASDAQ fell and commodities rallied, like gold and silver.
Traders at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. said that they re-routed all trades through EBS, the other major currency platform.
Thomson Reuters’ currency platform had become a larger platform than its main rival, EBS, with its average daily volume higher than EBS for ten-consecutive months in July, when the platform processed an average of $130 billion of trading voumes per day, a 10% decrease from June and 14% from the same time last year, hinting at a possible race from paper assets ongoing. Despite this dropoff, funds were still higher than those on EBS, whose average is $106.7 billion per day in July.
