Hanoi exchange begins online broker trading

The Hanoi Stock Exchange will launch online trading on Feb. 8 via 45 participating brokerage houses.
The Hanoi Stock Exchange will launch online trading on Feb. 8 via 45 participating brokerage houses.

Nguyen Thu Huong, an official from the exchange’s market information department, said that online trading would allow brokerages to send investor orders directly to the exchange.

Currently, investors place buy or sell orders with their brokers. The orders are then transferred to the exchange via representatives at the bourse. The process can take several minutes to complete, which can result in losses or lost opportunities to investors.

The new system would minimise costs, time and risk, Huong said.

The bourse originally planned to introduce the system at just ten or 15 securities firms which met technical requirements. But, pleased by the new system’s test run, the exchange early this week announced that 45 of the 93 securities companies with seat on the exchange would participate.

In the initial run, representatives of selected firms would continue to be physically present at the exchange, to provide service in case of problems with the new system.

“Online trading will run parallel to the current system,” Huong said.

HCM Stock Exchange spokesman Le Hai Tra said that online trading had been a success since it was launched on the southern bourse last January.

The HCM City exchange last year received 59,200 orders per day, equivalent to eight orders per second, Tra said. During a busy session, the system handled up up to 145,000 orders.

The online system there also seems to have lowered the number of violations of trading regulations, which last year fell to about half of their 2008 total./.

See more