As a result, share trading activities at Nepse began an hour later than the scheduled time of 12 noon.[break]
The delay in opening of the share market did annoy many stock brokers. But what infuriated them more was the bourse operator´s negligence in disseminating information on steps they had to take to establish connection with the back-up server.
“When back-up server is used IP address has to be changed on every computer used by brokers. Yet we were not informed about this on time,” Anjan Poudel, president of Stock Brokers Association, told Republica.
As a result many brokers failed to log in to Nepse´s system to place orders for shares that they wanted to purchase or offload.
Soon many started calling Nepse´s IT Department to query about the problem. But because of huge traffic many calls did not get through. “Those brokers who were lucky were able to talk to Nepse officials and were able to place their orders,” Poudel said. “But many weren´t that lucky. And by the time this lot knew how to fix the problem, the trading was about to end at the share market.”
The trading at Nepse lasted for only an hour and 15 minutes on Wednesday, as huge buying pressure caused the index to rally, propelling the stock market operator to halt trading midway.
Share prices had started rising soon after the market opened at 1 pm, as investor confidence reached new heights following amicable settlement of all contentious political issues. And by 1:20 pm, the index had climbed three percent. This tripped the first circuit breaker and trading was halted for the day.
The rally continued even after the trading resumed at 1:35 pm, and by 1:40 pm the market had gone up by four percent. This forced the market operator to introduce another circuit breaker and trading was suspended for half an hour. This trend continued for the rest of the day and trading was halted for the day at 2:15 pm after the index rose more than five percent.
The market exuberance did send the benchmark index up by 20.3 points, or 5.18 percent, to six-day high of 412.19 points. But due to negligence of market operator, the total turnover at the market was limited to Rs 21.92 million.
On May 3, when Nepse index had gone up by 19.86 points, the market had generated a turnover of Rs 45.85 million. On May 7, when Nepse index rose 24.19 points the amount stood at Rs 144.83 million.
“If the market operator had been a bit more careful and had circulated the information on IP address on time, more brokers would have been able to take part in trading and more transaction would have taken place,” Poudel said.
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