Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on December 20, 2019

KUALA LUMPUR: Trading on the local stock exchange was halted in the last 15 minutes when some proprietary day traders, scrambling to cover their short positions before the market closed at 5pm yesterday, may be affected.

Stockbrokers discovered the incident when orders could not be executed during the last quarter of the trading hour.

After the market’s close, Bursa Malaysia issued a statement notifying the investing public that it will not reopen the securities market for trading after the halt.

“The last traded price will be used as the reference price. The matter is currently being investigated. We will notify all relevant parties as soon as the issue has been resolved,” said the stock exchange.

Proprietary day traders are allowed to conduct short selling without a borrowed script, known as “naked short selling”. However, they are required to cover all their short positions within the same trading day.

In a separate statement last night, Bursa said trading will resume at 9am today, while it is still investigating the problem causing the trading halt. “The exchange remains focused on ensuring a minimal disruption to trading,” the statement said.

At press time, Bursa had not released an update on its investigation.

This is not the first time the exchange system suffered a technical glitch this year.

On Aug 23, Bursa said its FBM KLCI price feed experienced nearly an hour-long interruption, and resumed disseminating prices at 4.25pm on that

day.

The KLCI was last traded down 3.39 points or 0.21% at 1,595.72. The market was moving between 1,585.76 and 1,603.59 throughout the day.

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