Trading of shares at the Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE) is suspended today ahead of tomorrow's crossover to a new high tech electronic trading platform that will discard the inefficiency of the current manual trading of securities on the bourse.In an interview with Mmegi, BSE CEO Hiran Mendis said the new platform known as Automated Trading System (ATS) will not only increase the effectiveness and price discovery efficiency of the market but will take the market to investors, both domestic and foreign."When you do shares trading manually, you are limited by space and time.
The efficiency of the brokers will increase, as they will no longer need to come to the BSE to trade shares. They can now trade from their offices while communicating with their clients (investors) at the same time," said Mendis.Before the implementation of the new system, the BSE conducted a single thirty-minute trading session per day.With the ATS, trading will be possible throughout the day between domestic and foreign investors alike.Also, among the biggest attractions of automation is that it can take some of the emotion out of trading since trades are automatically placed once certain criteria such as price and brokers' capacity are met.The technology was acquired from MillenniumIT Solution, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange, at a cost of P9 million ($1.2 million).Government fully funded the automation project.
