CME Halt Electronic Gold and Silver Futures Trading Due to “Technical Glitch”

CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures market, halted all of its Globex electronic trading markets, including gold and silver, for four hours due to a “technical glitch” yesterday. This is the second time this has happened this year.

CME halted trading on its electronic platform and said it was due to “planned software reconfigurations.” CME, which owns the Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange and other markets, made the reconfigurations over the weekend as part of ongoing upgrades to technology, a spokeswoman said in a statement.

Market participants were left scratching their heads as to why the “planned software reconfigurations” did not take place prior to the commencement of trading.

All other Globex electronic trading markets, including U.S. Treasury’s, oil, gold and U.S. stock indexes were affected with many markets having order routing problems.

A note on the CME Group website said “CME Globex markets will Pre-open at 20:30 Central Time and Open at 21:00 Central Time. All day and session orders, including GTDs with today’s trade date will be cancelled. All GTCs that have been acknowledged will remain working.”

Earlier, trading was suspended indefinitely. Any day orders that brokerages attempted to file and any orders that were filled, dated today were canceled.

The problem may be related to one of the exchange’s trading engines but the exchange was still working to identify the extent of the damage according to a CME analyst.

This is not the first time that this has happened. The CME halted trading for some futures contracts for more than 90 minutes on April 8 due to “technical issues.”

The nature of the “technical issues” were not disclosed. Some analysts have warned that cyber war could see hackers, possibly state sponsored, attempt to disable and take down financial markets and exchanges as a form of financial warfare.

Security experts say China, Russia, the U.S. and other states are adept at and becoming more sophisticated at cyber espionage and warfare.

There is no speculation that this technical glitch was cyber terrorism or cyber war. However, it underlines the risk posed to financial markets and hence the importance of owning physical bullion coins and bars.