Stock brokerages bring back order cancelation, modification functions

The Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE)’s 20-year-old system has been overloaded in recent weeks due to a huge influx of new retail investors, slowed down to a crawl and required trading to be halted on June 1 that brokerages had told clients not to cancel or modify their orders.

The exchange had given the brokerages a "soft choice" to voluntarily suspend the features.

They still advise investors to limit the use of the cancelation and modification options to reduce the load on the system.

Officials from the State Securities Commission told VnExpress that the ban has been lifted after they saw that safety indicators have returned to permitted levels.

But they did not rule out bringing back the restrictions if the safety is again threatened. "By early July, the FPT system will be operational as planned," one of them said.

According to HoSE statistics, the number of orders being canceled or modified has dropped dramatically since the beginning of this month from 33.5 percent of trading, which caused the system to flash a warning, and to below 7 percent on Tuesday this week.

The SSC said market liquidity has improved greatly and there is more room for actual buying and selling.

The daily trading value has increased from VND21-22 trillion (US$905.2-948.3 million) last month to VND28-30 trillion now.

But many investors believe that the suspension of the modification and cancellation functions caused huge problems by distorting supply and demand, which led them to choose more risky trading approaches.