India's markets regulator sees no manipulation in stock closing auction, chief says

India’s markets regulator has not observed any manipulation in the newly introduced closing auction session that determines closing price levels, the Securities and Exchange Board of India chairman said on Wednesday.

The closing auction is a big market structure reform in line with global standards, Tuhin Kanta Pandey said at an event in Mumbai.

“We are considering all inputs to increase participation,” Pandey said, adding that any new system requires time to settle and attract more participation.

The closing auction is a separate 20-minute session introduced last week in which exchanges collect buy and sell orders to determine a stock’s closing price at a level where the maximum volume can be executed.

The mechanism, which replaced the previous method of using the average price of trades in the final 30 minutes of regular trading, was introduced to provide a fairer and more transparent closing price and improve execution efficiency for large orders.

India’s markets regulator unlikely to immediately review new stock closing auction, source says

The change has raised concerns about thinning participation and losses for some market players.

Mutual funds’ participation in the new system has risen from around 5%-6% on the first day to about 20%-25% since then, the regulator said.

The reform was needed to reduce tracking error for passive funds, he added.