Hi Peakoil et al
Firstly very sincere apologies to everybody that was inconvenienced by the techinal issues we had for a couple of hours last night.
It doesnt get much worse for an online trading company than to have a trading platform that is off line. It creates lots of problems for our clients who cannot view their positions and orders or trade and for us it affects all parts of our business from the traders to the sales traders and to our customer services. Our business model is based on having thousands of clients online, not on the phone, and we struggled to cope.
ETX need always to see 2 things to operate efficiently, our risk and the underlying markets so we are able to price correctly and to hedge any risk we may need to. When we cannot see the risk or the market we go in to emergency mode and try best to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. Our priority is to keep the business flowing in as responsible a way as is possible until the situation is resolved.
At very exceptional times we may not be able to quote a price unless it is for closing purposes only. I stress this is only at exceptional times and we would always (assuming the market is open) quote a side to allow a client to close their open position. I cannot remember a time in the last few years when due to our platform being down that we have not quoted a price to trade on over the phone.
Sometimes platforms go down - that happens to every platform and no one has a 100% up time. The ETX platform is online over 99.9% of the times it should be and overall that is comparable with most other platforms, especially spreadbet and cfd ones.
That is in no way meant to excuse what happened last night. We let ourselves down by being down and we will strive even harder to make sure we can do all that we can to ensure this doesnt happen again.
Best, Rob.