Dodgy becomes dodgier

As equity markets go, the Colombo Stock Exchange was the dodgiest around. Was? It just became dodgier with the implementation of the new Automated Trading System. It should be shutdown permanently to avoid further embarrassment or before the system breaks down completely.

Occasionally you would place a buy order only to find that it doesn't show up in the order book, so you place another one. At the end of the day when you get your order confirmation notifications you find that two orders have in fact been executed and you have twice as many shares as you wished to buy. Till last Friday, that sort of thing happened every once in a while. Now it has become the norm rather than the exception. Congratulations CSE. And Congratulations MillenimumIT for releasing a software with show stopping bugs.

Look at the image above. It is a screen shot of the days prices as shown on the CSE website. Note how the day's highest and lowest prices are not displayed for some counters. Does that mean the CSE has failed to record all the transactions for these shares? The downloadable CSV file is full of gaps (the link is to my archived copy, the original is updated daily)

The second point to note is how easily the price of APLA has been pushed up 9% with the purchase of just one share and how ALLI has been pushed down 12% by just one share being sold at bid price. This is the kind of manipulation that I mentioned in my previous post.