Bourses advance trade time
It will help Indian markets align with Asian exchanges
The country’s two major stock exchanges, National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) have decided to open the market in the morning from 9 am to 3:30 pm, as against current timing of 9:55 am to 3:30 pm, effective Friday, December 18, 2009.Accordingly, block deal session at both bourses will be between 9 am to 9:35 am.
It began with BSE announcing, on Tuesday, it would advance the timing of market opening by 10 minutes. A day later, on Wednesday, NSE went a step further advancing it by an hour with BSE following suit.
BSE Market Development Head James Shapiro said: “Ideally we would have been happy with advancing the time by 10 minutes, but now that NSE decided to further it by 9 am, we didn’t have much choice.”
Shapiro said “BSE is ready to advance the timing by an hour from Friday, though it had not thought of it. And the system would be able to adjust it to the new timings. We will be ready for 9 am opening by Friday.” NSE Managing Director & CEO Ravi Narain said: “We decided to advance the opening time by an hour instead of just 10 minutes to match the BSE timing, which we thought wouldn’t serve any purpose.”
“We know for certain that the market is not ready for late evening extension of trading hours as real-time gross settlement (RTGS) stops at 4 or some hour like that,” said Narain. He had expressed that smaller brokers may have a problem (technology wise) over extension in the timings but NSE would help them to upgrade the technological capability so that nobody’s should be disadvantaged.
The broking community have mixed feelings over the move. Angel Broking has welcomed the move, while others are not so exuberant saying it would put considerable strain on the system as well as to broking as well. However, soon after the Sebi not the broking fraternity was vertically divided over the extension and no consensus evolved till date.
