BSE, NSE to remain open till 5 pm
Mumbai: Leading bourses BSE and NSE said their equity and derivatives markets will remain open till 5 pm on Wednesday.
The move comes after the National Stock Exchange (NSE) suffered an outage earlier in the day due to technical glitches.
"BSE equity and equity derivatives markets will remain open till 5 pm today as decided jointly between exchanges today. All other markets timings will remain as normal," BSE said in a statement.
According to an NSE notification, futures and options (F&O) and normal market operations will resume at 3.45 pm and close at 5 pm.
Earlier in the day, the country's largest stock bourse NSE said trading across segments came to a halt at 11.40 am due to connectivity issues.
The bourse said it depends on two telecom service providers for connectivity, and both failed simultaneously, resulting in the outage.
However, the broader Indian markets were not impacted as communication lines at BSE continued even as NSE faced troubles.
"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," said Anand James, Chief Market Strategist at Geojit Financial Services.
BSE being open may not have been much solace but certainly a backup avenue for cash traders, he said, adding that VIX had calmed down after Monday's steep fall, and the extended session post 3.45 pm could help settle things.
As of Tuesday, Nifty and Bank Nifty rollovers were at 40.9 and 36.7 respectively, in line with what is usually seen on similar days of previous expiries, he noted.
