It appears 'officials' in Singapore have discovered what US officials know very well. The best way to stop selling pressure is to stop trading and so, as FinExtra reports, with STI beginning to weaken to the day's lows, a "technical glitch" ended trading on The Singapore Stock Exchange at 11:38am local time for the rest of the day. You'll never guess what happened next!!

Panic-buying in futures!!

(Click on image to enlarge)

This is not the first time...

The lock-out of South East Asia's largest stock market spoiled the one-year anniversary celebrations of chief executive Loh Boon Chye, who had promised that trading would restart at 2pm and then 4pm before admitting defeat.

The Exchange said that the malfunction was caused by duplicated trade confirmation messages, halting trading in blue chip stocks.

In the last of a series of terse message on the SGX wesbite, the bourse states: "SGX informs that the securities market will not resume trading at 1600 hours and will not re-open today."

No further explanations or reassurances about the prospect for a restart have been divulged.

In June last year, the Exchange was forced to spend S$20 million upgrading its technology and freeze its fees after being reprimanded by the city state's regulator over two outages in the space of a month.

In November the bourse was hit by a power failure that stopped stock and derivatives trading. Just a month later a software error saw the opening of trading delayed by more than three hours.

And given the success today, it won't be the last.