The New Nation - Internet Edition

Syed Amirul Haque

The number of retail investors at Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) is increasing day by day. Investors from different background and levels inside and outside Bangladesh are gradually engaging their valuable wealth in our capital market. At present DSE is trying to expand its activity outside Dhaka rapidly and as a result investors from different districts are also increasing. Definitely this is a positive sign for our capital market as well as the financial sector/economy of our country.

Beside big institutions, retail investors of our country are a very important part of our capital market which must be realized by the authority of our capital market. As a result of increasing investor number presently DSE is providing live/online trading data (3 minute delayed) through its official website www.dsebd.org. Now-a-days it has been seen that during trading hours number of investors/traders who trade from in front of trading workstations at different broker house premises is only a small fraction of the total number of off-floor investors/traders who trade daily over phone from inside and outside Dhaka. Most of these off-floor or outside-broker house traders have to solely depend on the live trading data of DSE website (www.dsebd.org) as frequent query about different stock prices throughout trading hour over telephone to broker houses is very costly, time consuming and full of hassle.

Problems faced by the users of DSE website:

1. SE website is hosted on the server of BOL (Bangladesh Online Limited) with little upload bandwidth allocation compared to actually needed. So during trading hours while many investors browse the site from homes/offices throughout the country due to bandwidth saturation most users cannot browse the site at all throughout the trading hours. But after trading hour it is accessible due to lower traffic. Only BOL clients get an edge in browsing the site during trading hours although most of the DSE website users throughout the country are clients of other ISPs/Mobile Operators.

2. t has been seen that many off-floor investors/traders lost their money in the market as they could not be informed about falling price of their stocks timely as they could not browse DSE website during trading hours (due to its bandwidth limitation) on which they were solely dependent.

3. s during trading hour there is much crowd remain present in front of trading workstations at broker house premises it is time consuming to get latest share price information frequently over telephone from broker house operators. This delay in getting share price information throughout trading hours greatly reduces efficiency of off-floor/outside traders in taking instant investment decisions.

4. xpansion of our capital market and expansion of investment is a demand of the time. DSE, SEC and BD Govt. are trying their best to enhance the activity of our capital market. Unavailability of online DSE trading data or low bandwidth of DSE website is creating and will also continue creating very bad impact in this mission.

Huge numbers of investors who solely depend on live/online trading data of DSE website are very frustrated and have reached at the last stage of their tolerance.

According to the severe problems faced by most off-floor traders of DSE throughout the country in accessing live/online trading data through their website mentioned above it is high time for DSE authority to implement an own web service system for live/online trading data with sufficient bandwidth so that off-floor traders can easily and instantly access latest stock price without any hassle. Now-a-days total daily trading occurring at DSE is several hundred crore taka and as a result DSE is collecting huge amount of commission from broker houses daily. So undoubtedly we can say DSE is rich enough to implement necessary bandwidth based web service for providing online trading data. Unfortunately still today they did not take initiative to organize their own web hosting system for online trading data which off-floor traders demanding since many months. Lack of a proper and speedy trading data service for a modern stock exchange like DSE which possesses highly qualified technical hands in their ICT/Web division has now become a prestige issue for them.

Immediately DSE authority should take appropriate bandwidth from a suitable service provider to construct their own hassle free web based live trading data service at this crucial stage so that every Bangladeshi off-floor trader/ investor inside and outside the country can easily access necessary data for their valuable investment.