Yesterday's outage could be bad news for Russian equity trading jobs in the medium term

First it was suspended for 1 hour. Then it was suspended for two hours. Eventually, it was suspended for three and a half hours. Micex apologised profusely.

Other exchanges have also been known to suffer outages. The London Stock Exchange went down for four hours in February 2011, but for an exchange which is vainly trying to attract more volume from overseas, Micex's suspension yesterday is bad news. Last week, Bloombergpointed out that the volume of Russian shares traded in Russia has sunk to 40% below the volume of Russian shares traded in London. Hence, the 30-day average value traded in shares of 10 of Russia’s biggest companies in London was $1.2 billion on April 16. On Micex it was just $760m.

Micex is seeking to remedy this. However, for equity trading volumes to improve in Russia - and equity trading jobs to flow to Moscow - the exchange will need to prove itself a lot more reliable. Yesterday's outage led to various accusations on Twitter that the exchange had been hacked. It will not do much to increase investors' willingness to use the Moscow exchange.