Thursday, February 9, 2012

Technical glitch halts share trading

Once again, share trading at Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) was interrupted owing to 'technical problems' in the trading system.
"Today, trading did not start for the first 45 minutes due to a problem in system connectivity," informed president of Stock Brokers' Association of Nepal Anjan Raj Poudyal.
"Nepse has not even clarified the reasons for the interruption but vaguely mentioned that the problem was in connectivity due to disturbances in the fibre optic cables," he added.
However, referring to such occurrences as trivial, spokesperson of the stock exchange Shambhu Pant said that trading was interrupted for only a few minutes and was not serious.
On January 19 too, Nepse's trading system was unable to process any transaction during the trading hours. Nepse had said the disturbance was caused by some hardware malfunctioning in the trading system. It undertook the transaction of placed orders at brokerages for an hour after 3 PM after it repaired the technological glitch, though the normal trading hours are 12 noon to 3pm.
Though the stock exchange has been through such interruptions earlier, those never exceeded 15 minutes, Poudyal said, adding that the repetition of such interruptions in trading due to technical reasons is alarming and there is no assurance that such events will not occur in the future.
The first hour is crucial for the market as investors decide on a bid and offer prices by observing the direction of the market early on. Based on the first hour, investors bargain and trade the stocks later on, he informed.
The interruption led to a contraction in trading volume today. The trading floor saw transactions worth Rs 13 million and trading of 58,429 unit shares through 828 transactions of 68 companies. But yesterday, 117,657 unit shares worth Rs 27.2 million were traded through 1,175 transactions.
The Nepse index continued its slide by losing 0.34 points today as only hydropower and others subgroup ended up in the green zone by earning 0.44 points and 0.18 points, respectively.

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