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

By: GoldCore

Today’s AM fix was USD 1,281.00, EUR 965.12 and GBP 772.29 ounce. Friday’s AM fix was USD 1,280.50, EUR 965.03 and GBP 772. 32 per ounce.

Gold climbed $3.10 or 0.24% to $1,280.40 on Friday and silver rose $0.01 or 0.05% to $19.38 per ounce.

Gold in U.S. Dollars - 1 Year (Thomson Reuters)

Gold fell immediately on the open on the NY Globex, from $1,280.40/oz to $1,275/oz after trading was suspended due to “technical issues”. Gold ticked $2 higher in trade in London after gold in Singapore drifted marginally lower.

Gold’s support is at the June lows at $1,242/oz which gold may test this week due to still low holiday volumes.

Silver for immediate delivery fell 0.3% to $19.45 an ounce. Support for silver is at $18.70/oz. Spot platinum was flat at $1,424 an ounce. Palladium was also unchanged at $889 an ounce .

Overnight, 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.”

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 war. However, it underlines the risk posed to financial markets and hence the importance of owning physical bullion coins and bars.

This update can be found on the GoldCore blog here.

Yours sincerely,
Mark O'Byrne
Exective Director

WINNERS MoneyMate and Investor Magazine Financial Analysts 2006

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