MANILA: The Philippines’ stock market on Wednesday closed 0.84% lower, with volumes thin due to more than two hours of halted trades that frustrated investors.
The Philippine Stock Exchange, the bourse operator, gave no reason for the stoppage, but said it would make further announcements.
The benchmark stock exchange index opened 0.22% lower on Wednesday, but trading was halted after just four minutes.
Trading resumed at 11:56 a.m. Manila time (0356 GMT), and stocks were down 0.36% by the noon break. Afternoon trades ran as normal from 0500 GMT to 0700 GMT.
“A market glitch for more than two hours is a terrible way to greet the new year,” Juan Paolo Colet, managing director at investment bank China Bank Capital Corp in Manila, said in a market commentary.
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The bourse needs to ensure infrastructure reliability to boost trading volumes, Colet said, adding that many traders were caught off guard by the lack of a timely explanation.
Turnover declined 15% to 3.11 billion pesos from a day ago, roughly just half of market’s average 6 billion daily transaction value for 2023.
In January 2022 the stock exchange cancelled trading for an entire day because of technical problems, with more than a third of market participants unable to establish a connection to the core trading engine.
A year ago, the bourse opened late because of a technical issue.
“There is no explanation around the stoppage from authorities, but broad consensus seems to attribute it to system technical glitches which have happened multiple times before,” said Yeap Jun Rong, market strategist at IG.
Stock market capitalisation of the Philippines, which trails that of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, inched up 1.1% year-on-year to 16.74 trillion pesos ($300.97 billion) as of end-2023, data from the stock exchange operator show.
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