KARACHI (July 19 2005): The board of directors of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) has started a system for freezing total outstanding COT positions to Rs 12 billion, irrespective of individual scrip.
According to a notice issued by the KSE on Monday, the governing board of directors of the Exchange in its meeting on July 16 reviewed the SECP directive, capping the COT value at Rs 12 billion in D G Khan Cement, Hubco, NBP, OGDC, Pak Oilfields, PSO and PTCL shares.
The board approved the following procedure, which shall be effective from Monday.
“System shall freeze the total outstanding COT positions to Rs 12 billion, irrespective of individual scrip.
“In order to arrive at allowable value on daily basis, after the COT release session, system shall take the COT unreleased value and minus it from Rs 12 billion.
“The system would allow the execution of value arrived in Step 2 on first-come-first basis. However, during the pre-open session system shall match orders on the basis of equal allocation.
“Since the system shall work on first-come-first basis during the continuous trading session, therefore, in order to provide level playing field to all the market participants the 'cross priority over queue within the same house' functionality of trading system shall be revoked.
“In the same context, the IT division of the exchange has made necessary changes in the KATS to suspend the COT market when the aggregate of unreleased and open market COT executed values reaches the limit of Rs 12 billion.
“In order to test the above changes, the IT division of the Exchange has arranged mock session on Thursday.”
The notice said there would be no change in the COT release session timing, which would be from 1.30 pm to 3.15 pm Monday to Thursday and 1.30 pm to 4.30 pm on Friday.
