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China stock market
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Outage at financial data provider Wind tests fragile sentiment in China’s onshore markets

  • Wind’s services remained inaccessible throughout the trading period for mainland Chinese markets on Monday, its subscribers told the Post
  • Outage did not ‘massively’ disrupt trading at a time of shrinking trading volumes: Soochow Securities investment manager

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A securities company in China’s eastern Anhui province. Wind has more than 300,000 terminal users, including all of China’s asset management firms, 85 per cent of its domestic brokerages and 75 per cent of the qualified foreign institutional investors that invest in Chinese stocks, according to the firm. Photo: AFP
Zhang Shidongin Shanghai
Wind Information, China’s leading financial data provider, suffered a technical malfunction that denied access to a large swathe of its subscribers on Monday, causing some trading snarls in Asia’s largest market.
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The data provider notified some users that a glitch in its main network had caused the outage, and its services – available via desktop terminals and its mobile phone app – remained inaccessible throughout the trading period for mainland Chinese markets, some Wind subscribers told the Post. Its data feed had not yet been fully restored when they were able to log in for the first time on the day, they added.

“Of course, [it] caused inconvenience for us,” said Dai Ming, a fund manager at Huichen Asset Management in Shanghai. “I have been unable to log into the Wind app on my mobile phone since around 7am, when I usually run through news headlines on it.

“There have been some cases of technical problems earlier, such as frozen screens when you exported data from Wind. But I’ve never before experienced a login failure like today’s.”

The outage is a setback for Shanghai-based Wind, which is viewed as China’s challenger to Bloomberg, the global data provider founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. While Wind was unable to quantify the full fallout of its outage on trading, some investors said that they were deprived of a key source of live-trading data and news headlines for research and investments.
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