The JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) only opened at mid-afternoon today after a network problem forced the exchange not to function properly. The JSE have said that they are embarrassed by this forced delay as it has cost brokers a lot of money and in turn also cost the JSE money. The JSE has had a pretty impressive track record over the last couple of years of having very minimal down time. Such technical and networks areas are expected all the time but contingencies have to be put in place so that an errors have a back up. In todays situation, there clearly was not a suitable back up plan and thus trading on the JSE started much later than normal.

It is thought that this delay has cost brokers no less than R20m. The costs are based on the amount of trade that takes place on the JSE; On a daily basis trades amount to approximately R20bn. Brokers charge a minimum of one cent for every R10 traded with some brokers charging much more than the one cent. So if one takes into account the R20bn traded on a day, brokers make R20m a day and that all will be lost if not trading takes place; thus one can see the impact todays ‘network failure’ had on the market.

Due this delay, the JSE only closed at 19:00 hours today. Hopefully this was a once of problem and it will not occur again. The JSE network usually has a 99.6% uptime. Todays occurrence should be the 0.4% down time they experience. It is interesting to note that a 0.4% down time costs R20m. One can clearly see the importance technology place in the world economy today.

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