The London Stock Exchange was hit by an embarrassing website outage today as quarterly trading numbers left investors disappointed.
A glitch meant the exchange unable to display real time prices on its website on Friday morning. In a notice on its site, the company said it was “investigating a technical issue”. A spokesperson declined to comment. The issue only affects the website display, rather than the underlying market, and is not understood to affect companies that buy price data from the exchange. It had been resolved by 10.20am.
The problem came as London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) reported third quarter figures below City forecasts. Revenue rose 7.6% in the quarter, with profit up 7.3%. The performance was driven by a 17.2% surge in sales at its capital markets division thanks to bumper trading activity on its fixed income and derivatives trading platform Tradeweb and good volumes on its platform FXall. However, a weaker performance in the company’s data and analytics division and its post-trade division saw earnings undershoot in those parts of the business.
“LSEG’s group revenue growth was better than expected on a constant currency basis, but it was largely driven by the strength in Tradeweb, where we expect decelerating growth in 2022,” said Michael Werner, an analyst at UBS.
Analysts at Citi called the revenue mix “marginally disappointing”.
LSEG left forecasts for the full year unchanging, saying growth would not be as fast in the final quarter of 2021 as it had been in the third quarter. Shares dipped 302p or 3.7% to 7782p.
LSEG completed its $27 billion acquisition of data giant Refinitiv at the start of the year and LSEG CEO David Schwimmer today said the company was “making excellent progress” on integration. He said LSEG was “comfortably on-track to achieve £125 million of cost synergies in 2021, ahead of our original phasing.”
