Mizuho’s Trading Platform Crashes as IPO Stocks Debut

Mizuho Financial Group’s online stock platform crashed on Tuesday due to a system failure. The technical issue occurred at the same time of Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co, whose initial public offering the bank underwrote, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the crash of Mizuho’s Net Club website was due to a network failure. The bank said it would report more details when they become available. Although, it did not specify when the system will recover.

A spokesman for the Financial Services Agency (FSA), Atsushi Maruyama, said the Japanese bank reported the issue to the regulator. However, the glitch did make it difficult for shareholders of the Tokyo-based paper wholesaler to trade the stock on its debut, Maruyama confirmed.

While the online Trading Platform Trading Platform In the FX space, a currency trading platform is a software provided by brokers to their respective client base, garnering access as traders in the broader market. Most commonly, this reflects an online interface or mobile app, complete with tools for order processing.Every broker needs one or more trading platforms to accommodate the needs of different clients. Being the backbone of the company’s offering, a trading platform provides clients with quotes, a selection of instruments to trade, real In the FX space, a currency trading platform is a software provided by brokers to their respective client base, garnering access as traders in the broader market. Most commonly, this reflects an online interface or mobile app, complete with tools for order processing.Every broker needs one or more trading platforms to accommodate the needs of different clients. Being the backbone of the company’s offering, a trading platform provides clients with quotes, a selection of instruments to trade, real Read this Term is offline, investors can still trade by phone, and at branches, Maruyama added.

Despite the glitch, shares of Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co jumped up to 37 percent, before closing 7.6 percent higher. Japan’s third-largest bank by market value, Mizuho, was the lead manager of the offering.

Commenting on the technical glitch to Bloomberg by phone, Haruyoshi Asada, a Kokusai Pulp executive who oversaw the listing said: "we were surprised to see this happen on our first day of trading.”

He also added that it was too early to determine any impact on the trading of the stock.

IPO analyst at DZH Financial Research in Tokyo, Kazumi Tanaka, said Mizuho's clients: "might have missed an opportunity to sell the shares at a high price.”

According to the report, Mizuho said the outage was unrelated to a major systems upgrade that the financial group is implementing.

Another technical glitch

The Japanese investment giant is no stranger to technical glitches. In fact, the bank has had a series of mishaps which has garnered the attention of regulators in the past.

In December 2005, a costly “fat-finger” typing error saw the bank mistakenly offer to sell 610,000 shares of J-Com Co. for 1 yen each, instead of one share for 610,000 yen. This mistake cost the bank billions of yen, and the FSA ordered it to improve its operations.