A flurry of erroneous orders placed by an Indian broker sent the country's top stock market tumbling briefly on Friday, raising renewed concerns about the stability of trading systems after a series of global market glitches. Trading on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) was briefly halted after the 59 trades worth more than $125 million were placed, triggering a sudden drop of more than 900 points on the Nifty index, the exchange said.
It said the orders, for an institutional client, were sent from a single dealer terminal at Emkay Global Financial Services. Traders said the NSE's trading systems appeared to have held up well, and the index ended the session down just 0.7 percent. But Emkay's actions marked the another incident in a glitch-filled year for India's share markets, fuelling concerns about whether they are equipped to deal with potentially much bigger incidents of the type if not the magnitude of the Wall Street "flash-crash" of May 2010.
"Frequent halts of trading have created a lot of confusion in the minds of investors, impacting overall sentiment in the market," said Hiten Gala, a senior manager at brokerage Sharekhan.
Emkay, a financial services firm founded 17 years ago, closed out all the positions from the misplaced trades, the NSE said, adding it had been suspended from trading. Indian market regulator SEBI was looking into Emkay's misplaced trades, a senior official told Reuters. He declined to be named because the matter has not been officially announced.