Everbright Securities punished, faster reforms urged

As Everbright Securities took the bitter medicine from its trading error, Chinese investors are urging faster reforms in the country's securities sector to avoid similar incidents. China's securities watchdog said Friday it has completed an investigation of last week's abnormal trading by Everbright Securities that prompted a spike in the domestic stock market. A spokesman for the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said that a number of problems exist in the proprietary system of Everbright Securities and the firm fails to meet the requirement for risk control. Due to problems in its internal management and information systems, CSRC has decided to suspend the company's own investment accounts and require it to take rectification measures. A detailed report on the investigation results and penalties will be announced later. BITTER MEDICINE Erroneous trading by Everbright Securities last Friday caused a 5.96-percent gain in the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index in about three minutes. Flaws in the firm's proprietary "strategy trading system" resulted in the placement of a huge number of buy orders. The CSRC soon started the investigation and Everbright Securities sealed up the system and trading data. The firm suffered an overall loss of 194 million yuan (31.7 million U.S. dollars) during trading that day. Investors following the spike to buy stocks suffered much more than that, as the market surrendered all the gains quickly in the afternoon trading. The company's director and president Xu Haoming was replaced by a temporary president Yuan Changqing on Thursday. According to a filing to the stock exchange on Thursday, the company's operating revenue during the first half of 2013 amounted to 2.4 billion yuan, up 13.24 percent year on year. The stock price of the company has plunged more than 15 percent this week, and closed 1.4 percent lower to 9.84 yuan on Friday. The brokerage company has also been ordered by the CSRC to suspend lead-underwriting any new debt financing instruments of non-financial enterprises in the country's inter-bank bond market. REFORMS URGED Hu Yuyue, an expert of securities and futures at the Beijing Technology and Business University, called for better financial supervision in the securities market. The regulator should carry out real-time monitoring of the stock market and guard against risks brought by abnormal trading, Hu said. It is important to quickly trace the source and destination of funds. In the wake of Everbright Securities' trading error, the CSRC is mulling response measures to prevent similar cases from happening again. The commission has organized a symposium on "program trading" to solicit institutional investors' feedback to reduce risks, reported Friday's China Securities Journal. Program trading is a type of trading in securities, usually consisting of a basket of stocks that are executed by a computer program simultaneously based on predetermined conditions. Some local regulatory agencies have taken action. The CSRC's Henan bureau said Wednesday that it had launched a self-examination move. It has required local securities firms and futures companies to submit reports on their self-examinations in a month.