No irregularity found in Sept 26 market halt: SEC
The Stock Exchange of Thailand's circuit breaker was accidentally tripped on September 26 because of a sharp plunge on the secondtier Market for Alternative Investment (MAI).
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the circuit breaker was set to function when the SET Index drops by 10 per cent and 20 per cent. Though the SET and MAI have separate breakers, they share similar parameters. As such, on that day, when the SET Index lost 9.42 per cent but the MAI loss was 10 per cent, the circuit breaker automatically sent a “market halt” message to all brokerage houses.
“The exchange fixed the problem, with an adjustment to the MAI circuit breaker’s parameters,” the SEC said in a statement.
It also said there was no concentration of transactions when the market was halted.
On the same day, the Thailand Futures Exchange also had to delay the nighttrading hours by 40 minutes because of the large volume of transactions. The SEC said TFEX had fixed the problem to cope with high volumes.
The finding, completed with thorough discussion with executives of the exchanges, was submitted to the SEC’s board of directors on Oct 6.
