World shares mostly higher; Tokyo trading halted by outage

Shares were higher in Europe and Asia on Thursday, while trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was suspended due to a technical failure in its computer systems.

Tokyo Stock Exchange officials said they were working to restore normal trading by Friday morning. They said trading was halted early Thursday because rebooting the huge system would have caused confusion.

TSE President Koichiro Miyahara repeatedly apologized for the disruption to trading on the world's third largest exchange, where about 70 per cent of brokerage trading both by value and volume is by foreigners.

France's CAC 40 gained 0.8 per cent in early trading to 4,839.81, while Germany's DAX edged less than 0.1 per cent higher, to 12,763.27. Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.6 per cent to 5,901.48.

US shares were set for gains, with Dow futures up 0.8 per cent to 27,884. S&P 500 futures rose 0.7 per cent to 3,374.62.

In Asia, Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 1.0 per cent in the afternoon to finish at 5,872.90. Trading was closed in South Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China for national holidays.

Share prices also rose in Southeast Asia and India. The outage on the exchange eclipsed Japan's main economic news of the day, the first improvement in manufacturing sentiment in three years, despite the pandemic.

Asked how officials planned to take responsibility for the trading outage, a common question in Japan when troubles occur, Miyahara said the exchange would focus on fixing the problem before considering such issues.

He said the exchange will investigate to assess any losses caused to investors.

Previous outages occurred when the “arrowhead" system created by Fujitsu to handle its electronic trading became overwhelmed with too many orders at one time.

Officials said the latest problem was also in a Fujitsu product, but the exchange does not intend to seek damages from the company.

Investors are turning their attention to American jobs numbers due out Friday and watching to see if Congress and the White House can iron out deep partisan differences to agree on fresh help for the US economy.