Colombo shares close 9 mts late on Wednesday; market loses

The Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) on Wednesday closed 9 minutes late today- at 2.39 pm due to a technical fault and was manually halted.

“In the interest of minimising the impact to investors, in the best judgement of the CSE management, it was decided that all transactions executed up to 2.39 pm will remain valid. The relevant records in the CSE and Central Depository Systems will reflect this position,” the CSE said in a media release.

This is the first time such an incident has happened, analysts said. The CSE front end and back end were not properly synchronised electronically today, an analyst said. Stockbrokers and analysts were dismayed at this performance saying such a technical glitch should have never happened.

Amid this saga, stockbrokers were saying that a lot of manipulation is happening in the market currently where certain high net worth individuals and their stockbrokers are bringing down fundamentally strong stocks in the hope that their favourite low valued shares that were not moving during the past few weeks will start to move up. “But that didn't happen. It didn't go their way and the entire market suffered,” a stock analyst said.

New social media darling Softlogic Life Insurance Plc (AAIC) released its 4Q2021 results to CSE showing a price to book value of 5.8 times end a trailing 12-month price to earnings ratio (PER) of 29. The CSE price to book value is 1.6 times and it’s PER is 13 times which makes AAIC more expensive, some analysts said. Also, the company has informed the CSE that there is no price-sensitive information. “But the AAIC share price went up by 12 per cent and the turnover was Rs. 539.9 million which shows how manipulation,” a stockbroker said. Softlogic Holdings saw a crossing of 300,000 shares at Rs. 73.00/share with LOLC Finance and Teejay Lanka 500,000 shares crossings.

The All Share Price Index was down 300.78 points to close at 12,081.69 with S&P SL 20 down by 113.02 points to close at 4,052.58 on a Rs. 5.28 billion turnover.