Stock market continues in free fall for fourth day

The baht yesterday also recorded one of the biggest weekly drops in years, falling to 35.90 to the US dollar.
Yesterday’s stock-market decline followed a drop of 1.02 per cent on Tuesday, 3.15 per cent on Monday and 0.6 per cent last Friday.
Airports of Thailand, PTT, CP All, Kasikornbank, Banpu, Siam Commercial Bank, Advanced Info Service, Bangkok Dusit Medical Services, the Siam Cement Public Co, and True were among the top-10 most active stocks in yesterday’s trading.
Individual investors were net buyers with a combined value of Bt4.66 billion, while other three groups of investors were net sellers.
Brokerage firms’ proprietary trading units were the biggest net sellers at Bt3.02 billion, followed by institutional investors who were net sellers at Bt1.22 billion, and foreign investors at Bt411.36 million.
As of 3.58pm yesterday, the SET Index had slumped to 1,392.93 points, dropping 49.28 points with a turnover of Bt108.44 billion after spiralling as much as 97 points at the opening of the afternoon trading session yesterday.
Trading value yesterday was high at Bt130 billion.
Thai stocks were seen to be reacting to domestic unfavourable factors, including news regarding warnings of possible car bombings in Bangkok and its suburbs.
Besides the SET Index tumble, foreign investors also moved more than US$400 million (Bt14.3 billion) out of Thai sovereign bonds in the first two days of the week.
In the event of the stock index fall exceeding 10 per cent on a given trading day, the market’s circuit breakers will be activated to temporarily halt trading.
The SET circuit breakers were triggered twice in 2008 and trading halted for 30 minutes after the SET Index dropped more than 10 per cent on October 10 amid political protests.
The circuit breaker was also activated on October 27 for another 30 minutes due to negative effects from the US 2008 sub-prime crisis, which led to a six-year low for Thai stock prices.
Regarding current market uncertainties, officials at the Finance Ministry, Bank of Thailand and the SET reportedly held an urgent meeting to discuss measures to cope with possible heavy declines in stock prices.
In other regional markets, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index yesterday shed 0.6 per cent, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index down 0.6 per cent in a third day of losses as Bank of China Ltd and Bank of Communications Co sank more than 2.8 per cent. In Japan, the Topix Index lost 1 per cent.