/ 14 July 2008

Revenues lost as JSE market fails to open

The JSE’s failure to open its equity market at 9am on Monday was ”very inconvenient in terms of revenue lost”, said an analyst.

The opening auction on the JSE equities market only started at 3.10pm. ”Trading will continue until 7pm today,” read a statement issued on behalf of the JSE’s chief operating officer, Leanne Parsons.

A JSE official had indicated on Monday morning that the trouble was due to a technical problem.

Earlier, Lavan Gopaul, analyst and research manager at Cortex Securities, said: ”We started off with the index futures market at 8.30am but at 9am the equity market didn’t open.” He added that futures and other markets in the JSE stable shut at midday.

”The JSE has said that it’ll give us an alert 15 minutes before they start to trade — they’ve cited technical problems for this delay,” he said.

Gopaul said that clients had been unable to exit positions and brokers had not made their turnover. ”On any given day, the JSE trades between R12-billion and R15-billion — so commission on that could amount to R100-million,” he pointed out.

Even the JSE itself had lost out on considerable revenues.

”It’s a big news day today,” Gopaul said, referring to the United States Treasury and Fed’s weekend actions to bolster mortgage lenders Fannie May and Freddie Mac.

The US had opened positively in the futures market and the United Kingdom had been trading through positive territory.

”So today should have been a day when we had a strong opening,” he said. — Sapa