It is a day of high drama on Dalal Street. The day when Sensex hit a new high, trading was halted by NSE for 3 hours due to a technical glitch. Traders complained about quotes not getting through almost minutes after the Sensex hit a high in opening trade. Finally, regular F&O and cash market trade resumed well past noon. What was particularly striking was the mayhem and chaos in the interim and the lack of support from the exchanges.
If you refer to Twitter posts, you would realise that there was no specific and official announcement by the National Stock Exchange till about 20 mins after the trading glitch halted regular execution of the trade. The matter acquires particular significance when you consider the sheer volume of trade that happens through NSE. Close to 80% of stock market trade in India is executed through NSE. In fact even after the problem was identified, NSE announced pre-open session twice and it failed both times. Finally well past 12:30, the rates normalised and began updating normally in both the F&O and the cash segment. In fact source based reports indicate that the exchange was even considering shutting down for the entire day after they failed to revive trading twice.
While the market regulator SEBI said that it is in touch with NSE and probing the matter and the interim NSE CEO maintained that they are working to resolve the ‘technical glitch’, the question is what happened to the backup systems that are in place. Why was trading not started from the disaster recovery site in Chennai? In fact, the disaster recovery site is a replica of the primary site which ensures all exchange data is replicated on a real time basis, which should start if the trading is disrupted on the main segment. In fact, the NSE had created the disaster recovery site with the same purpose. The server that is carrying such huge trade volume can sometimes be subjected to technical issues but during all those emergencies, the disaster recovery site was the advanced arrangement that was created to act as a cushion against all these emergencies. The idea was to avoid any form of change or interruption in future. The idea was to allow seamless and smooth execution of trade even in the case of any emergency in the main Mumbai trading hub.
A big question and deep probe in necessary in this aspect too!
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