“If due to any technical reason or otherwise, continuous trading on stock exchanges is disrupted, it is of paramount importance that not only all market participants including other MIIs (market infrastructure institutions), are promptly informed about the outage but also the trading hours are extended, if required, so as to provide opportunity for smooth closure of intraday positions,” Sebi said in a circular.
The regulator defined stock exchange outage as stoppage of continuous trading, either suo moto by the exchange or due to reasons beyond the control of the bourse. However, stoppage of continuous trading would include trading halt on account of index-based market-wide circuit breaker. Sebi said the affected stock exchange should immediately inform various stakeholders about outage.
The regulator said market participants should be intimated immediately but not later than 15 minutes from occurrence of outage through broadcast message and by publishing on its website.
The affected exchange should update about outage in intervals of 45 minutes from the initial intimation, until normalcy to operations is restored. Extension of trading hours, if applicable, should also be mentioned in intimation by the affected stock exchange.
