LME electronic trading resumes after nearly 3-hour outage

Electronic trading on the London Metal Exchange’s LME Select platform resumed at 17:30 GMT on Monday after an outage of nearly three hours caused by a technical issue.

Prices for the LME’s metal contracts, including copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, nickel and tin stopped updating on LSEG’s Workspace platform shortly before 15:00 GMT.

The LME, the world’s oldest and largest market for industrial metals, said its primary electronic matching engine encountered an issue, causing electronic trading to enter a technical halt. The inter-office market remained open throughout, it said.

“Although all closing prices were produced per the LME’s usual process, a disruption event was declared, because the system issue affected the ability of market participants to hedge at the relevant prices,” the LME said in a statement.

The exchange had earlier said it expected to have to resort to a backup approach to produce closing prices.

On January 30, the LME delayed the start of electronic trading by one hour due to a technical issue.

The electronic market was restarted on the secondary matching engine at 17:30 GMT on Monday and trading is scheduled to continue as normal until 19:00 GMT, the LME said.

(By Tom Daly; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Tomasz Janowski)