“Nifty and Sensex indices should be allowed to be traded on all the exchanges in future. If there is uniformity of products across the exchanges, the problem noticed today would have got automatically resolved due to the interoperability feature,” said V Raghavendra Prasad, CEO of Anmi, in a letter to Sebi.
The brokers lobby also demanded that NSE should consider waiving the penalty provisions of all open derivative positions because of the delayed complete system for Wednesday and Thursday.
Anmi also called on the market regulator to frame a well defined policy and process to handle such emergency events to avoid panic and distressed actions to manage outstanding positions.
Prasad accused NSE of failing to properly communicate and disregarding traders’ interest. He said even as most systems were running, the exchange shut its operations without any warning and informed of resumption of trade a bit too late.
“We believe that the exchange had knowledge of the situation at the initial trading hour when the position remained at peak level, however, no steps were taken by exchange to minimise the damage of loss to investors,” said Anmi.
Many dealers and traders have also blamed the exchange for lack of timely communication. They accused NSE of shutting the system without any notice. Moreover, NSE informed the media of reopening of trading only at 3:28 pm, and tweeted about the same well after trading resumed.
By the time NSE informed of the resolution of the issue and extended trade timing, most brokers had squared off open leveraged positions of their clients, which is a usual practice, meaning traders were left with no positions when the trading resumed and the market rallied sharply. This resulted in losses for many traders.
“All this happened due to lack of clarification from NSE on trading restart timing. They informed only after all cash positions were cross settled at abnormally high discounts and premiums on BSE,” said Prasad.