Outage on electronic-trading platform stalls bond market
Traders on Friday afternoon said trading in Treasurys ground to a near-halt, citing an outage by Brokertec, one of the largest platforms for trading U.S. government paper electronically between primary dealers. The platform is run by NEX Group, which was acquired by the CME Group in 2018. The 10-year Treasury note yield was down 3.2 basis points to 2.699%, according to Tradeweb data. It was unclear how many traders were affected, but some market participants described the outage as a "big one," which was impacting a broad swath of the fixed-income market. However, another trader said volume was already thin on Friday afternoon before the outage. "Brokertec is experiencing technical difficulties and trading has been temporarily suspended. Will notify all participants of a restart time when we have more information, and all orders are out of the system and are not at risk," said a spokeswoman from the CME Group.
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