23-07-2025
Trading halt at MCX: What led to suspension for over an hour at the commodity derivatives exchange
A technical glitch at the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) led to a halt in trading on the commodity derivatives exchange for 1 hour and 15 minutes on Wednesday. Trading on the exchange resumed at 10:15 am, MCX said. The disruption affected trading in the commodity futures and options segment of the exchange.
'Trading started on the exchange at 10:15 am today, due to delay in clearing technical processes and file sharing,' the exchange said in a statement.
Initially, the exchange on its website said that trading was 'expected to start by 9:45 am'.
The normal trading session on the MCX starts from 9 am to 11:30 pm from Monday to Friday. Agri-commodities are available for futures trading up to 5 pm whereas other commodities such as bullions, metals and energy products are available up to 11:30 pm/11.55 PM and international referenceable agri-commodities are available for trading up to 9 pm.
The special session on the MCX is held from 8:45 am to 8:59 am on weekdays. This session is being held to cancel the pending orders prior to opening of the market.
This is not the first time that trading was disrupted on MCX due to technical glitches.
On February 13, 2024, the trading at MCX was delayed for four hours. On that day, MCX had commenced trading at 1 pm instead of the scheduled time at 9 am. The commodity derivatives exchange attributed the delay to the slow processing and generation of backend files for the members.
In July last year, a global outage of Microsoft Systems was reported to cause disruptions across various sectors globally. However in India, all exchanges and clearing corporations functioned without any impact. Out of the over 1,400 trading members ecosystem, there were 11 trading members who reported disruptions to their operations, which were either resolved during the day, or are being resolved, exchanges had said.
MCX is the country's leading commodity derivatives exchange with a market share of about 98 per cent in terms of the value of commodity futures contracts traded in the financial year 2024-25. During the 12 months ending March 31, 2025, the average daily turnover (ADT) of commodity futures and options on MCX surged by 101 per cent, reaching Rs 2.19 lakh crore, compared to the previous year's ADT of Rs 1.09 lakh crore.
The ADT of commodity futures surged by 38 per cent during the year to Rs 27,153 crore, compared to Rs 19,636 crore in FY24, the exchange said.
The combined number of traded clients for futures and options witnessed a 39 per cent growth, reaching 12.96 lakh from 9.32 lakh last year.
