Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) is pleased to announce that the Post Release Test for AMS/3.8, an update to the securities market trading system, has been completed successfully, paving the way for the system to be rolled out in advance of the start of trading tomorrow (Monday) morning.

The upgrade will increase the securities market’s efficiency and transparency and pave the way for future growth.  It will increase the trading system’s processing capacity over the current capacity by about 10-fold to 30,000 orders per second, scalable to 150,000 orders per second, and reduce latency to 2 milliseconds on an average trading day, about 70 times faster than present and better than the project target of 9 milliseconds at 30,000 orders per second.

Market transparency will also be improved as AMS/3.8 will display the 10 best price levels compared to the five best price levels in AMS/3.5.  In addition, the market data broadcast rate will be doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 stock page updates per second and some legacy system functions will be streamlined to improve Exchange Participants’ (EPs) operational efficiency.

HKEx would like to thank EPs and Information Vendors for their cooperation and participation in various market rehearsals and other preparation work for the rollout of AMS/3.8.

As a prudent measure, a comprehensive contingency plan is in place should AMS/3.8 not perform as anticipated.  The plan includes a two-week stabilisation period from 5 to 16 December during which fallback procedures will be in place to allow HKEx to return to AMS/3.5, the trading system prior to the upgrade, in the unlikely event it needs to do so.

The system fallback is expected to take approximately three hours.  Trading will resume on the same day if 15 minutes or more of continuous trading can be conducted following the resumption of trading and before the end of the trading day. Trading will resume on AMS/3.5 the following trading day should the fallback announcement be made any time after 12:45 pm.

Trading in stock options and stock futures will also be suspended when trading in the securities market is halted.  Trading in stock index futures and options market will continue according to the markets’ usual timetable despite the trading suspension in the securities market. 

The public will be informed when such contingency procedures have to be activated. 

Note: AMS, the Automatic Order Matching and Execution System, is the trading system for HKEx’s securities market.

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