The Chicago Board of Trade had an on-again, off-again Monday.
The exchange’s electronic trading system shut down at 9:20 a.m. Monday for nearly two hours because of sporadic outages. Then, after being online for 20 minutes, it shut down again at 11:30 a.m. for another hour before trading was able to resume in the afternoon, said CBOT spokeswoman Melissa Jarmel.
Board of Trade officials said only electronic financial contracts were affected.
“It was determined that a temporary trading halt was deemed appropriate in order to maintain consistent and fair access for all market participants,” a CBOT statement said.
Open outcry trading — where traders shout out their buy or sell offers on the floor — continued as usual, Jarmel said.
The Chicago-based exchange trades futures and options on agricultural and financial products. About 65 percent of CBOT’s total trading volume is done electronically, but most of those contracts are also traded on the floor and weren’t affected by the system’s electronic problems, Jarmel said.
Officials do not know what caused the outages.
The electronic glitches caused Canada’s Winnipeg Commodity Exchange to stop trading, said Winnipeg spokesman Mike Gagne. Winnipeg, an agricultural futures and options exchange, switched to electronic trading in 2004 and trades about two million contracts a year.
The CBOT also hosts trade for some contracts on the Kansas City Board of Trade and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Only one KCBOT contract was affected by the shutdown. Messages left with the Minneapolis exchange were not immediately returned.
