The early end to trading on the TSX and other exchanges operated by the TMX Group last Friday should be a “wake-up” call for regulators, according to the president and CEO of the Aequitas NEO Exchange.

“It was a bit of a hectic day,” said Jos Schmitt in an interview with BNN Bloomberg Monday morning, noting Aequitas NEO picked up some of the trading slack.  

“It’s a day where I [felt] very frustrated – not because of the TMX, because this can happen to anyone – it could happen to us tomorrow. … But frustrated because we missed an opportunity to do what is right for the Canadian market.”

“[The TMX] created, in fact, a lot of uncertainty.”

The outage began at 1:37 p.m. ET, and occurred due to a “hardware failure,” according to a statement issued by the TMX Group on Saturday. The parent of the Toronto Stock Exchange said the malfunction was not the result of a cyberattack.

“I think markets will be resilient, but it’s a black eye for capital markets here in Canada – there’s no doubt about that,” Schmitt said.

“I hope this a wake-up call for the regulators.”

He noted there can never be an 100 per-cent-guarantee that technology will perform as expected, but is urging regulators to conduct a full-fledged investigation and come up with solutions so that a situation like this will be a “non-event” if it happens again.

The TSX resumed trading normally Monday morning.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story inaccurately portrayed Schmitt’s argument about access to market data. In fact, he was calling for access to consolidated data across all Canadian markets. BNN Bloomberg regrets the error.