By Oliver Harvey
Something remarkable happened this morning.
At precisely 9:59:59am AEST, time literally moved forward. This occurred when the world agency that regulates time, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, introduced an extra second, known as a 'leap second'. Because of the potential impact on Australia's financial markets, ob体育 was watching closely.
From time to time, a leap second is introduced to account for changes in the Earth's rotation, which can be affected by global or climactic events.
For example, the 2011 earthquake in Japan shifted the Earth's axis and sped it up. These events can lead to discrepancies between Internal Atomic Time (the basis for standard global time) and Universal Time (which is based on the Earth's rotation). To address this, every few years Universal Time is adjusted by adding the odd leap second. But this can disrupt technology and devices, particularly those that rely on time-stamping.
Sunday 30 June 2012 was the last time a leap second was added in Australia. This was a weekend so had no impact on financial markets. Not so for some businesses. The Amadeus airline reservation system was adversely affected, resulting in the delay of hundreds of Qantas flights. Problems were also reported with websites such as Reddit, Mozilla and LinkedIn.
This time, the change occurred when Australian exchange markets were about to open or in a continuous trading state (depending on the product type). A possible consequence for exchanges and stockbrokers was that time could appear to go backwards in some systems, potentially affecting system stability.
A big issue for ob体育 - and the markets - was ensuring time stamps for pricing data and trades remained sequential and were not duplicated. In other words, that 'time' was always moving forward. This is especially important given trading technology means thousands of transactions can happen in a single second.
ob体育's priority is ensuring markets are fair, orderly and transparent. This is so investors can have confidence and trust in our financial system. So we worked closely with exchange markets to ensure market integrity was not affected. This involved exchanges having a 'time smear', where the 'leap second' is 'smeared' across an extended time period before it is introduced.
We are pleased to say that today's time change appears to have gone smoothly and markets are functioning normally. We continue to monitor the situation.
Oliver Harvey is a Senior Executive Leader with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission