London Metal Exchange delays electronic open after platform glitch

The London Metal Exchange halted the opening of its LMEselect electronic trading platform on Friday after a technical problem, sending brokers a notice and pushing the start of trading back by roughly an hour. The exchange told Reuters in an emailed statement: "Due to a technical issue there is a delay to the opening of LMEselect." Trading resumed at 02:00 GMT, or 10:00 a.m. Hong Kong time, when the platform got underway belatedly.

Initial notices posted to brokers described the platform as suspended and said the related technical issues were "still under investigation," with no expected time for resumption, according to the Aastocks feed. That early uncertainty gave way to a roughly one-hour interruption, after which normal electronic sessions continued for the day within the LME's regular operating window. The exchange normally runs LMEselect from 1 a.m. to 7 p.m. London time and is owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

The outage landed at the end of a turbulent week for base metals. Bloomberg summarized the disruption as "causing confusion among traders after a week of intense volatility and eye-watering price gains." Market data and contemporaneous reports show sharp swings in copper and other industrial metals that amplify the operational risk of any trading interruption. Longbridge, in a paywalled bulletin, said LME copper had soared 11 percent in a single session the previous day and then fell by as much as 3.9 percent after trading resumed. Aastocks' news feed carried related headlines pointing to elevated activity across commodities, including reports that CME had increased silver futures margins while March silver futures surged roughly 6.3 percent.

Short, unplanned outages on major venues can multiply market-moving flows when price moves are already large. Traders and clearing firms may face compressed time to adjust positions, and rapid price moves around a suspension can trigger margin calls and forced liquidations. Market participants said the pause briefly disrupted order routing and left some desks uncertain about execution timing during a window when price momentum was extreme.

The LME said the technical fault was under investigation; Aastocks quoted the exchange as saying there was no expected time for resumption at the moment of the broker notice. The exchange did not provide further detail on the root cause, whether the telephone market or ring trading were affected, or whether any trades were cancelled or subject to review. Longbridge characterized the interruption as "the second significant exchange failure incident in two months," a claim that will need confirmation against records of earlier platform outages.

Beyond immediate trades, the episode underscores questions about infrastructure resilience on markets that set global prices for commodities such as copper, zinc and aluminium. The LME is the world's largest industrial metals bourse, and interruptions during episodes of speculative pressure highlight operational and oversight challenges for exchanges and their regulators. Market participants and authorities will be watching for the exchange's post-incident report and for time-stamped trade and price data to assess the event's full market impact.