Stocks investors frustrated over repeated trade disruption

DSE’s high-cost new trading system falters
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Repeated trade disruption at the Dhaka Stock Exchange despite the installation of a high-cost trading system last year to get rid of recurrent technical glitches has made investors and officials of the brokerage houses unhappy.
In a latest instance, the trading at the bourse on Sunday was delayed by almost four hours due to a system failure and the trading hours of the bourse were cut short to one hour and forty minutes from the regular four-hour session.
Officials of the brokerage houses said that they had tried to upload investors’ portfolio data on the DSE server within the stipulated time before the beginning of the day’s session, but failed.
Buy-sales of shares are executed as per the data uploaded by the brokerage houses, so without uploading the investors’ portfolio data transaction is not possible, they said.
Stockbrokers said many investors left brokerage houses due to the delay in trade commencement.
‘Repeated disruption to the trading at the bourse reflects a lack of competence of the bourse to tackle an emergency situation,’ a senior official of a brokerage house said.
He also said that the DSE should have alternative server to tackle such disruption with its main trading system.
The bourse since the launch of a high-cost, Tk 35 crore, new trading system at the bourse on December 11 last year has been suffering from various problems including delay in placing orders at the trading server in late trading hours.
In March 3 this year, trading at 40 brokerage houses of the DSE was disrupted for a period of around one hour due to technical glitch in the bourse’s newly-introduced system.
A DSE news release issued in this connection said, ‘The technical issue which resulted in the disruption to trading was related to its integrated trading system whereby trading information for selected brokers were delayed beyond acceptable limits.’
‘This would have placed affected brokers at a disadvantaged position compared to its peer group,’ it said.
‘In order to prevent this situation arising, the DSE took the decision to delay trading till all market participants had equal opportunities to trade,’ it said.
The Dhaka Stock Exchange and its international technology partners worked
in three jurisdictions to resolve the issue and to open trading facility as soon as possible, the DSE release said.
It said the combined effort of all those involved had resulted in market opening at 2:20pm for all brokers, albeit for a truncated trading session of 1 hour 40 minutes.
The spot trading at the bourse, however, was only for ten minutes instead of regular four hours.
‘Although the bourse in last year launched a new trading system, but we are facing several problems with the trading system,’ said Mohammad Alauddin, an investor.
He also said that the new system of the bourse was slower than the previous system as it took more time to save an order and it was difficult to place an order in late trading hours when a fraction of second delay might cause severe financial damage.
Asked, a Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission senior official told New Age on Sunday that the commission had already asked the DSE to explain the reasons for the technical malfunction within the day.
The DSE had replaced its earlier MSA Plus system on the same ground —frequent disruption to trading.
For the new trading system the DSE last year procured an upgraded matching engine from NASDAQ OMX, an American multinational financial services corporation, and the order management system from FlexTrade, a US-based multinational company.
During the selection process, Nordic Growth Market NGM AB, a Swedish stock exchange, had withdrawn itself from the software procurement process blaming that the bourse’s process of procurement was non-professional and opaque.
Source: New Age