SINGAPORE, July 14 — Singapore Exchange Ltd halted all equities trading on its market today morning, suspending shares including DBS Group Holdings Ltd and Singapore Airlines Ltd

The bourse said in an e-mail the measure was temporary, and that trading would resume at 2pm The halt was caused by duplicated trade confirmation messages, it said.

"These things happen when you improve the system and move from a stock exchange floor to automated trading,” said Andrew Clarke, Hong Kong-based director of trading at Mirabaud Asia Ltd, who trades Singapore stocks for his clients. "As long as they get the system up and running before 2pm, I’d say that the disruption would be low.”

It’s at least the second malfunction to affect SGX’s systems in the past year. There was a near two-hour disruption in derivatives trading in August after a technical fault.

In 2014, the Monetary Authority of Singapore reprimanded SGX for two trading disruptions that occurred a year earlier, a blow for the bourse operator under former Chief Executive Officer Magnus Bocker. He was replaced in July 2015 by Loh Boon Chye, formerly Bank of America Corp’s head of Asia-Pacific global markets.

"It’s not the first time it’s happened in Singapore,” said Steven Leung, executive director at UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Ltd "Hong Kong may be better—I don’t remember when Hong Kong had such a suspension because of technical issues—but people will forget about such events after some time.” 

Singapore Exchange is home to South-east Asia’s largest stock market, with total capitalisation in the city of US$494 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. About S$1.57 billion (RM4.6 billion) of shares changed hands on an average day in the past 12 months. — Bloomberg