Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Australia’s stock exchange is investigating a disruption to its futures trading platform that affected trading earlier today for about an hour. The futures trading system, known as SYCOM, is functioning normally following the incident, spokesman Matthew Gibbs said in a telephone interview. “This kind of disruption to the market is huge,” said Rob Wallis, a senior dealer at IG Markets in Melbourne. “Anyone physically acting in the underlying market would have been affected by the outage. Their clients would have been trapped in positions and totally exposed to any market movements during that period.” Australian futures volumes averaged around 35,000 contracts per day last week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s about 5,800 contracts per hour. Today’s incident roughly coincided with the release of key Australian employment data by the statistics bureau. “There was an incident on the SYCOM system,” said Gibbs, adding that trading was affected between 11:34 a.m. and 12:35 p.m. in Sydney. “It’s being investigated now. Our main focus was on getting the markets restarted, and the markets are operating per normal now.” The Sydney Futures Exchange stopped trading on Jan. 7, 2000, for 42 minutes because of technical problems. The exchange said at the time was not related to the so-called Y2K or millennium bug but rather to a “network diagnostic tool.” “Once trading stops it makes it difficult for people using share price index futures and options,” said Lucinda Chan, division director and head of Asian business at Macquarie Private Wealth in Sydney. “The employment data was coming out about the same time, so it was not a good day for the exchange.”

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