Trading at the start of the week soared as news on a possible vaccine boosted sentiments and rallied markets. With the announcement of a Covid-19 vaccine which is reported to be 90% effective, trading activity surged while the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at the highest level on Monday since February 20th. With the sudden surge in trading activity, popular U.S. platforms experienced technical difficulties, leaving many individual traders out in the dark.
Traders were unable to login into their trading accounts on a number of the biggest trading platforms. Certain individuals, who were able to access their accounts, found that a string of features didn’t work while statistics and trading data was inconclusive. This left many traders ruing missed opportunities and set others up for lost profits by the end of day.
U.S. stocks surge
Technical difficulties came on the back of massive trading activity throughout Monday. What has been a lacklustre trading environment for the most part of 2020, a resurgence in investor confidence has given us glimpses of what could be a bullish market in the near future. Shares from prominent American companies, many of which have suffered losses month-on-month, increased by at least 19%. The stock-jump led to the highest trading volume within the first 30 minutes of the day in the last 18 months. This was a welcome respite for companies such as Carnival Corp and United Airlines Holdings Inc. Both of which are under immense pressure as the tourism sector, with bans on traveling across the globe, continue to suffocate these industries and the companies that operate within. But, with renewed optimism as a vaccine may well be in the latter stages of development, companies might be able to sustain prolonged increases in share prices.
Ultimately, trading platforms were overwhelmed with the sudden increase in traffic from the start of trading on Monday morning. This led to several platforms’ having to confront technical difficulties as customers could not login to their accounts. Not only were they unable to login in, this meant that traders couldn’t partake in the trading extravaganza. By the close of day, more than 3.7 billions shares had changed ownership. One some platforms, traders were able to login in but were confronted with the stark reality of a platform that did not display any trading information. This meant traders would need to place trades without knowing the price, statistics, or trend of the stock in question. Trading blind is certainly not a recommended activity. As such, many had to stand on the sidelines. The inability of trading platforms to facilitate and handle high volumes of traffic have been rectified for now.
However, this is certainly an issue that will require further attention as markets may well react with much volatility depending on what happens over the winter months. This comes down to the re-emergence of Covid-19 cases and practical applications in stemming the tide of a resurgence. On the other hand, if the latest news on a vaccine is to come to fruition, we may be in for an uptrend that takes markets into 2021.
