Exchange outage risk
Why does the chance that a trading venue stops working matter most in the very weeks you need it?
In plain words
Exchange outage risk is the possibility that a trading venue halts matching, rejects orders, or becomes unreachable exactly when trading is heaviest. It is an operational failure of the venue, not a market move, and it leaves no trace in price, volume or funding data.
Why it matters
A trader's stop, limit or liquidation price only matters if the venue accepts the order. In a violent week, an outage can turn a manageable loss into an uncapped one, so risk models must assume execution may fail when prices move fastest, even though historical candles look continuous.
In a real week: ETH, week of 11 July 2022
In the ETH week of 11 July 2022 to 17 July 2022, the range reached 41.4% and realised volatility 111.0% a year, with the largest 1-hour move of 6.63% at 16:00 UTC on Sat 16 July. Dollar volume was 12.11 billion, 1.08 times the prior 12-week average, and the 14.57% return sat at the 87th percentile of 230 weeks. The data records no outage field, so nothing here confirms or denies halted trading.
A common mistake
Treating a clean hourly candle series as proof the venue was continuously available. Prices can look smooth while orders were queued or rejected, and these data contain no field that would reveal such interruptions.