NSE resumes trading after a brief halt, stock exchanges to remain open till 5 PM

• The national stock exchange and the BSE have extended trading hours till 5 PM today after NSE halted trading for at least 4 hours.
• The halt left the traders in a lurch about their positions a day ahead of the derivative contracts' monthly expiry.
• In minutes after the resumption, Sensex surged over 800 points to top 50,670 mark; Nifty neared 15,000.

The National Stock Exchange and the BSE have extended trading hours till 5 PM today after NSE halted trading for at least 4 hours due to a technical snag.

The trading at NSE resumed at 3.45 PM. In minutes after resumption, Sensex surged over 800 points to top 50,670 mark; Nifty neared 15,000 mark, up by over 270 points.


"BSE equity and equity derivatives markets will remain open till 5 pm today as decided jointly between exchanges today. All other market timings will remain as normal," BSE said in a statement.

Taking note of the around four-hour-long "trading halt" on the National Stock Exchange (NSE), SEBI has directed the bourse to carry out a detailed analysis of the incident and submit its report to the regulator at the earliest.

In a statement, the capital market regulator has also told NSE to explain the reasons for trading not migrating to the disaster recovery site.

"SEBI has advised NSE to carry out a detailed root cause analysis of the 'trading halt' witnessed at NSE today and also explain the reasons for trading not migrating to the disaster recovery site. SEBI has asked NSE to submit its report at the earliest," it said.


Earlier today, the stock exchange had to cancel all open orders of option and currency futures after trading was halted. However, the broader Indian markets were not impacted, as communication lines at BSE continued even as NSE faced troubles.

The traders were left in a lurch about their positions a day ahead of derivative contracts' monthly expiry.

Anand James, chief market strategist at Geojit Financial Services said “Expiry eve is a crucial day for expiry related trades as time decay sets in. As indices froze a little after 10 am, F&O trades that reference such benchmark indices also slowed down. With hardly an hour's trade possible for such index-based traders the higher margins on F&O positions may have been a double whammy.”

The bourse said it depends on two telecom service providers for connectivity, and both failed simultaneously, resulting in the outage. NSE, in a statement, said, “NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy and we have received communication from both the telecom service providers that there are issues with their links due to which there is an impact on NSE system.”

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