All,



Over the weekend, the London Stock Exchange are migrating their trading platform/price feeds to a new technology, with several differences in the data format. This change will affect all data providers and all brokers, as they will be switched to the new system.



The new system will be live as of Monday 14th February.



We have been making the necessary changes and performing comprehensive testing to make sure that the change goes smoothly and does not affect our users. However, due to the complex nature and fundamental restructuring this change is forcing onto ALL data providers/brokers, there is a possibility that some providers may experience difficulties.



We are confident that the service should be working as normal, however, should you do spot any issues from open on Monday morning, please let us know.

Ian

All,

Our sincere apologies for the lack of service today.

While we cannot guarantee that all will be well tomorrow, we are doing our best to remedy the situation.

Best regards,

Geoff

Thats not very reassuring Im afraid -presumably youve been doing your best to remedy the situation today with a marked lack of success.You havent addressed the the above question at all.

Amazing, whingeing shower! Were all in the same boat here, have some patience!

but we shouldn`t really all be in that boat should we Chris. This change was known about months ago. If you ran a business that depended on day to day sales would you allow this to close you down for a day, maybe more, I think not. LSE, A FTSE COMPANY! Can`t make a change without failing its customers! Some very bad management somewhere.

The irony is that the LSE is not taking the flak. It's the public facing websites that have to placate irate investors (including Selftrade who are also still struggling). I have got to agree that it seems irresponsible to go live with something as important as this, that still has major glitches.

My point exactly Harry, LSE to blame.

This latest LSE debacle followed hot on the heels of the MAM debacle last Monday, which I imagine tends to focus minds on the visible provider rather than the numpties in the background (LSE). Checked out a few other sites and brokers throughout the day, all of whom have suffered the same / similar issues. I would guess customer services at the LSE (if they have such a service) are getting a good kicking, well, I would hope so.

Just noticed this on Natwest Stockbrokers site:-

"Due to technical changes at the London Stock Exchange this weekend we have found that there are issues affecting the execution of UK Stop Loss Orders. While we work to resolve this issue with the London Stock Exchange please do not submit any new UK Stop Loss Order instructions. If you currently have a UK Stop Loss order in place, please cancel it and manually place a sell order online or over the telephone at the desired price. We apologise for any inconvenience."

It would have been nice to have had an email from them!

I'm not convinced the LSE are directly to blame for yesterday - except insofar as they decided to change systems because they made the mistake of basing their system on Windows Server and .NET under Clara Furse a few years ago, which was avoidable stupidity.

I suspect the problem here is that all the various brokers and data providers have their own proprietary systems interfacing with the LSE's, and while the LSE has tried to help, the ultimate responsibility falls on the providers to amend their systems. That's why we saw some companies manage without problems and others entirely fail to cope. If the problems lay solely with the LSE one might expect everyone in the LSE data ecosystem to be suffering but obviously they aren't.

Recently I had the chance to completely rethink price feeds when I wrote my own Level 1 software application - which ended up being part data feed and part market scanner. It's what I've wanted as a trader for a long time and frankly, I think it's what most other traders who use Level 1 would want if they saw it too. But designing it reminded me of how old our existing Level 1 systems are - MoneyAM is essentially using the same type of system as ADVFN and the design dates back to the 1990s. In other words a lot of these systems were written a long time ago and the original developers have moved on. If no-one's touched the code for Level 1 or Level 2 in several years it's almost inevitable that when changes suddenly need to be made it isn't going to be a smooth experience.

When I got that email from MoneyAM I knew it was probably going to go wrong, because that's how things are with MoneyAM. I said once before that personally I'd prefer it if MoneyAM raised their prices and made the service better and more reliable rather than creating the distinct impression that technically everything's held together with spit and glue. But would people pay more for a service that worked all the time and worked in a better way? MoneyAM must have crunched the numbers on this and the answer is no. So maybe we have to accept that we're flying the equivalent of EasyJet here and it is what it is. I pay the same now for two separate L1/L2 feeds that I paid for just one several years ago when MoneyAM seemed more like BA. MoneyAM's competitors have their problems so what we seem to be left with these days are a few companies competing at the bottom-end of the market for prices with the consequence that none of them are doing it very well. I think we just have to live with it.

You are joking. Prices have already been raised by some margin recently.
I pay a decent sum so expect it to work and be reliable!.
Otherwise i may just as well go elsewhere.

this is shocking going into a second day.

Kyoto - the funny thing is Proquote also still wrong on certain things and they charge 150 per month and are owned by the LSE! Otherwise you are right about budget service. Best you can do is pay for two or three providers and have two or three trading accounts and hope they don't all go tits up at the same time. Otherwise need to shell out for a Bloomberg or Reuters.

Good post Kyoto.

This is a general problem and I guess known about - For example, ARM shows as 643 +32, but a 2 day chart shows it as down on the day.

skinny,

Thanks, there is a current problem with closing prices for some sections of the site. streaming stockwatch appears to be ok.

Best regards,

Geoff

This has been a very odd one for us, this transition was meant to happen over 6 months ago, but kept being put back by the LSE because of technical issues their end.

Instead of running duplicate systems alongside each other to test, they gave us a small dump of test data and then a complete switchover, discontinuing one service and starting another. The changes in themselves were not huge except they discontinued publishing a mid price, so now there is no 'official' mid price and a number of other fields were changed around.

We tested this pretty rigorously; level 1 yesterday was okish but the LSE feed got flakey in the afternoon. Level 2 caused us a lot of head scratching because we could see the opening auction appear ok and Market Maker prices and volumes but the SETS order book although coming through was not displaying. This was tracked down to incorrect order types being set in the feed causing them to be ignored/behave strangely. We still see a -1 coming through with each order which again shouldnt be there and this is being addressed.

I can only apologise on behalf of MoneyAM, the LSE and the feed suppliers for such an appalling day. There is still work to be done and we are on it

As previously mentioned, streaming appears to be ok today

Bullshare,

Thanks for the work, which you and your team are doing.

A packet of aspirins is still cheap, but I would be prefer a bottle of Brandy,

Have a better day.

All,

We now have a fix for the -1 prices appearing in the Level 2 order book.

However, as it is a non-crucial bug we are going to deploy it tonight, after market close, so as not to jeopardise the current order book.

We expect all to be fixed ready for 2mrw.

Best regards,

Geoff

any chance you can sort the SNRP book out? thanks.