Programming failures at DSE catch investors off-guard

FE Report The Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) went haywire Sunday as its software wrongly calculated the actual gain and loss made by 135 securities which converted their face-value into Taka 10 from the day. Many shares which actually gained were shown net losers due to the programming which errors caught the share traders by surprise. Normally, the change in market price is equivalent to the difference between a day's last traded price and the previous day's closing price. While the DSE calculated Sunday's closing price taking into account ten taka as the face-value for 135 listed securities, it kept Thursday's closing prices unchanged in accordance with the previous face-value and market lots. The resulting errors showed net loss by most of the newly-converted securities even though many of these shares have, in fact, made net gains during the day. Titas Gas, Savar Refectories, Samata Leather, Aramit Cement, HR Textile, Chittagong Vegetables, Eastern Housing Limited, Sonali Aansh, United Insurance, Rahima Foods, Samorita Hospital, Prime Textiles, Standard Insurance were among the victims of the programming faults. As per the DSE calculation, the prices of these securities declined by around 90 per cent, triggering a flood of inquiries and complaints from hundreds of puzzled investors. On the other hand, mutual fund AIMS First showed abnormal hike by 857.75 per cent although the security lost 4.22 per cent in accordance with its latest face-value. A DSE official acknowledged the "gross mistake", saying they should have fixed the errors ahead of Sunday's trading. "The DSE software takes into account the last trade price in calculating the changes in market prices. That's why the flawed calculations were executed based on the last traded prices of Thursday," the official said. "We hope the problem will be fixed automatically by our software tomorrow (Monday), taking into account Sunday's adjusted prices," he said.