Nasdaq has reported two outages of its Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) Tuesday.
The first occurred from the open at 9:30 am to roughly 9:43 am ET. The second was from 12:57 pm to 1:35 pm ET.
The TRF is the facility which is used to report trades on dark pools in either Nasdaq, NYSE or BATs listed stocks. On any given day, a little less than 40 percent of total trading volume gets reported to the TRF.
Trading was not affected, only reporting the trade. Dark pools are required to report trades within 30 seconds of execution to a reporting facility.
Nasdaq has not specified the cause of the outage.
With the Nasdaq TRF, the choice for those who traded on dark pools was to: 1) not trade, or 2) route the reporting to the NYSE TRF, which operates a parallel facility.
Many of the dark pools elected not to trade at the open, because many are not hooked up to both TRFs.
It's likely that this will accelerate the need to hook up to both TRFs as a need for a backup. This highlights the need to avoid a single point of failure for trading systems.