Anmi slams NSE for delay in Wednesday's technical glitch announcement

The Association of National Exchanges Members of India (Anmi) has written to market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) saying there was no timely public announce­ment by NSE regard­ing Wednesday’s technical glitch, which caused huge monetary losses to members and investors, including intra-day traders.

“All open positions remained at peak levels. The glitch happened one day before the expiry of monthly and weekly contracts... Hence, there is a greater need of engaging deeper investigation in the matter,” Anmi said in a note on Thursday.   

It said trading could have continued as there was an issue only with two spot indices. Reasons for not activating the recovery site after 45 minutes of the outage also remained unknown. 

Lack of information about resumpt­ion of trading caught traders off guard. “They could have averted panic selling by online brokers on BSE and prevented huge monetary loss to investors. All this happened due to lack of clarification from NSE on restart. They only informed after all cash positions were cross settled at abnormally high discount and premiums on BSE,” Anmi said. 

Anmi wants the exchange to waive penalty provisions of all open derivatives positions and/or cash for Wednesday and Thursday. It also said a well defined policy and process is required to handle such sit­uations and manage outstanding positions.