Trading on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) was disrupted for nearly three hours yesterday by a technical glitch, causing also delays in releasing many of the company announcements.
The outage, which affected the network system just after first three minutes of trading, came as stock prices of the prime bourse were staging positive.
The DSE in a statement said the technicians found that brokers failed to link with the main trading server of the bourse in the morning. “Immediately after identifying the technical problems, we are able to re-link trading network between DSE and brokers,” said its chief technology officer ASM Khairuzzaman.
The halt caused 42 minutes trading losses, as the DSE has extended closing hour of trade to 3:15 pm instead of usual 2:30 pm after resuming trade at 1:15pm.
An executive of a leading brokerage firm said traders had executed buy and sell orders that had piled up once the platform was up and running again. Other traders complained about a lack of disclosure from DSE about the glitch, but no one reported any losses.
“The halt may not have impacted volumes much, but it does dent the DSE’s image,” said Shajahan Chowdhury, a trader at a brokerage in Dhaka. “We face similar disruption on the exchange again and again.”
Following the shutdown on the day, Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) has directed the DSE to form a probe body to get into causes of technical glitches.
“I asked the DSE verbally to submit probe report on technical problem as early as possible,” Saifur Rahman, a BSEC spokesperson, told the Dhaka Tribune.
In mid-last year, the regulator had directed the DSE to replace its trading software after an investigation team found that the glitches were a result of negligence on the part of the software vendor as well as the bourse.
It suggested replacing the faulty MSA Plus platform, acquired from UK-based software vendor Xchanging for around $600,000.
In line with the instruction from the regulator, the DSE last month finalised the deal with two US-based vendors to replace existing trading engine TESA and online trading terminal MSA Plus.
NASDAQ OMX, the world’s largest exchange company based in the US, that earlier submitted a design on trading terminal and FlexTrade Systems, the global leader in broker-neutral algorithmic trading platforms and execution systems for equities, foreign exchange and listed derivatives, will implement the system.
“It is expected to start with new trading platform it by October,” a DSE official said earlier.
Last time the DSE had the technical glitch on March 20 last year during first trading day of Orion Pharma following succession of technical glitches over the years.
“The performance of the present trading platform was faulty as it had to halt trading on a number of occasions particularly when a new company made debut,” said a trader.
The DSE blamed “technical issues” for the failure and was not able to say exactly how many announcements had been delayed. Yesterday, the most important announcements were corporate declarations by two companies.
