EEX published its final suspension procedure on 9 October, specifying how its Management Board declares exceptional circumstances and restarts regulatory market-making duties. Contractual market-maker obligations remain unaffected. The publication establishes a procedure; it is not itself a declaration of market disruption.[1]
Which circumstances qualify
Grounds for an EEX declaration
| Ground | Scope |
|---|---|
| Volatility | Extreme volatility triggers mechanisms across the majority of EEX financial instruments or their underlyings.Source 1 |
| External disruption | War, industrial action, civil unrest or cyber sabotage.Source 1 |
| Disorderly execution | Compromised fair, orderly and transparent execution plus significant system delays/interruptions, multiple erroneous orders/trades, or insufficient capacity to operate the venue.Source 1 |
| Transparency | MiFIR Article 9(4) suspension for derivatives/emission allowances with insufficient liquidity; affected classes only.Source 1 |
Announcements normally expire at that trading day’s close. Longer periods require necessity under the non-volatility grounds. EEX continuously reassesses the circumstances; expiry and revocation take effect at a trading-day end, after which the regulatory rules resume.[1]
The existing duty still determines the workload
Under Exchange Rules section 33, admitted regulatory market makers quote both sides for their own account within specified spreads on at least half the trading days in a month and for at least half the daily trading hours. Failure for three consecutive months, followed by an unsuccessful warning, can lead to revocation and a prohibition on pursuing the strategy.[2]
Those thresholds create an operational reason to record the declaration precisely. If a hypothetical month has 20 trading days and two are excluded, the day-count base becomes 18: half is nine days, compared with ten before exclusion. That example assumes every remaining day is otherwise eligible and does not replace the separate daily-hours test. It illustrates denominator management, not a prediction that EEX will declare relief.[1][2]
A firm’s incident record should therefore connect the announcement, affected scope, effective period and subsequent restart with the way it measures quoting performance. An operational dashboard that merely stops a clock when volatility rises would not establish that the exchange declaration covered that period.
Commercial terms can demand more
Exchange Rules sections 31–32 treat private market-maker agreements separately from regulatory admission. Agreements set liquidity provision and remuneration and can specify spread, size, quote-holding and time requirements. Market makers must also be contactable during trading hours.[2]
For a liquidity provider, the commercial consequence is that regulatory relief may not settle the economics of an outage. Its agreement needs to be read for the treatment of interrupted quoting, performance payments and any contractual relief. The incident owner should know whether a regulatory notice changes the commercial performance calculation, requires a separate decision or leaves it untouched. The published procedure itself supplies no universal contractual payout rule.[1]
A trading suspension is another distinct decision. Section 42 of the Exchange Rules permits product or market suspensions when orderly trading or settlement is at risk; affected orders and quotes are deleted and new entry is unavailable during the suspension.[2]
Brokers using the order book should consequently track the service that remains available as well as the obligations temporarily removed from liquidity providers. A market can be open while its ordinary mandatory liquidity support has changed. Execution plans should respond to the available prices and depth, rather than assuming that every regulatory relief notice also closes the venue.
Sources & further reading
- Market-making suspension procedure, 001a EEX · 9 Oct 2026 · Accessed 21 Oct 2026
- Exchange Rules, 0067a EEX · 15 Sep 2026 · Accessed 21 Oct 2026