
The National Stock Exchange restarted regular trading at 3.45 pm, and both the Bombay Stock Exchange and NSE have decided to operate till 5 pm on Wednesday.
This comes after the largest stock bourse NSE said trading across segments came to a halt at 11.40 am due to connectivity issues.Trading on BSE was normal across all segments on Wednesday. All pending orders on the NSE were cancelled.
"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.
At the time of writing, the index was at 14,799.90, up 0.63%.
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.
The bourse had earlier 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.
"NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy and we have received communication from both the telecom service providers that there are issues with their links due to which there is an impact on NSE system," a statement from NSE spokesperson said.
"We are working on restoring the systems as soon as possible. In view of the above all the segments have been closed at 11.40 and will be restored as soon as the issue is resolved," it added.
In June 2020, NSE had suffered a technical glitch. At that time, its bank option segment prices were not reflecting on the terminal linked to the exchange.
In September 2019 too, the bourse's system faced a trading outage as investors were unable to place orders in the final minutes of the trade.
With inputs from PTI