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Chaos at Calcutta bourse

A technical fault in online trading system led to utter confusion at the Calcutta Stock Exchange, or CSE, today when transactions were executed at Friday's post-closing rates causing huge losses to brokers.

Normally a bid placed in the post-closing session or in the normal session, if not executed on the same day, stands automatically cancelled on the subsequent trading day.

However, this did not happen and those who had made buy bids on Friday in the post-closing session had to suffer huge losses as their bids were not cancelled and transactions took place today.

Notably, only those brokers suffered who had made bids for purchasing on Friday and not the ones who had entered bids for selling since there was huge decline in share prices in the kerb deals on Friday and Saturday.

When trading resumed today, traders had made bids for purchasing accordingly at much lower rates than the closing rate or post-closing price of Friday.

However, when the opposite party entered bids for selling at lower rates they got executed at the much higher rate of Friday's closing as the transactions of highest bid for buying and lowest bid for selling are executed on priority basis through C-Star.

Affected brokers raised loud protests, forcing CSE president J M Chowdhury and executive director Tapas Datta to come and try to pacify them.

Both the president and the executive director could not be contacted even after repeated attempts, but they had reportedly conveyed to the brokers that the CSE will not do anything in this respect and there was no possibility of the transactions being altered.

Brokers alleged that today's development was a high-level conspiracy. However, a source close to the existing committee of the exchange said that the bourse has asked the affected brokers to submit claims against today's losses.

UNI

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