As you wash the sticky summer sand from your feet or prepare to pull on the boots to enjoy the powder snow at a northern hemisphere ski resort, spare a thought for Helen Lofthouse, chief executive of the equities market operator ASX.

She starts the year with another apology for the CHESS clearing and settlement system following an embarrassing and mysterious outage in December that raised doubts about the resilience of the near-30-year-old plumbing at the heart of equity capital markets. Traders were left fuming on December 20 after the CHESS T+2 system, which settles trades two days after stocks are bought and sold, temporarily stopped working.