Overnight futures trading suspended due to system failure

SEOUL, July 16 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's overnight futures market closed two hours and 20 minutes earlier than usual due to a system failure, the bourse operator said Tuesday.

The country's overnight KOSPI 200 futures trading linked to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world's leading derivatives exchange, closed at 2:40 a.m. (Seoul time), the Korea Exchange (KRX) said. The market usually opens at 6:00 p.m. and closes at 5:00 a.m. the next day.

"The suspension in futures trading came as the system's power supply suffered a shut-off spontaneously," an official from the KRX said.

The KOSPI 200 option trading linked to the EUREX, a derivative exchange in the European region, remained intact.

The KOSPI 200 refers to a basket of 200 blue chip shares listed on the main Seoul bourse. Futures contracts call for an investor to buy or sell a specified asset at a set future date at a predetermined price.

The KRX also suffered a system failure in its computation of the benchmark KOSPI on Monday, and transmitted the index with a 15-minute delay for more than an hour starting at 9:15 a.m.

Monday's malfunction came as the bourse operator's main and back-up systems simultaneously broke down. The KRX added a probe is under way to determine what exactly happened.