SET's online trading program crashes during morning session

The online trading program of Settrade Dot Com Co, an SET subsidiary, failed to execute trading orders at 10am yesterday before returning to normal at 11.54am.
SET president Kesara Manchusree said the exchange was informed that Settrade could not be accessed during that period but it was now functioning normally.
Investors need not be affected by such difficulties, as other trading channels such as marketing staff at brokerage houses, aside from the Settrade, are available.
Kirati Kosicharoen, director of Settrade Dot Com, said the system failure followed a software update during the previous night. The failure had an impact on more than 30 brokerage houses, as investors were unable to send their trading orders through Settrade on computers or mobile phones.
Initially, the company switched to a backup system.
The company will invite securities companies to a meeting to explain the incident, he said. Under the terms of its contract, Settrade will compensate its members if trading orders could not be sent.
Kirati said this was not the first time Settrade had experienced difficulties. The number of users of the online system has skyrocketed from 3 per cent initially to 50 per cent of total securities trading accounts, and that has had some impact.
Kantara Ladawan na Ayutthaya, executive director of Finansia Syrus Securities, said that after receiving notification that the online |system had gone down, it contacted its cus-tomers for acknowledgement and then switched to sending trading orders by phone and its own system.
An anonymous source from a securities company said the system failure was a very big problem, as online trading now amounted to more than 50 per cent of accounts, and Settrade was the most popular system.
After the Settrade failure, the trading turnover on the SET was not as high as it has been, and there were a number of investor complaints, he said.
However, the SET Index yesterday was up by 19.84 points or 1.25 per cent to close at 1,602.54, as rising world oil prices resulted in higher prices of energy stocks, which weigh heavily in the Thai stock market. The trading volume totalled Bt52.37 billion.