Putting the best foot forward, by choice

The recent City Day organized by SunGard in Mumbai provided interesting insights into India's equity trading industry. Mr. Damodaran, ex-head of SEBI, the capital market regulator put India's liberalization and globalization into perspective by pointing out that often in its recent history India has been forced to take actions that are seen to be desirable in hindsight. In 1990-91, it was the precarious forex reserves situation that forced India to open up its economy. Moving on two decades down the line, one hopes that electronic trading in the form of Direct Market Access (DMA), Smart Order Routing (SOR) and algorithmic trading would be something that our capital markets adopt out of choice and because they see the merit in doing so, as opposed to either being forced to do it, or even worse, not doing it at all and facing the possibility of extinction once the global broker-dealers enter the market in a big way. A trend that usually follows the widespread adoption of electronic trading is the concentration of trading, especially in one financial center across a region. In Europe, London happened to be the center that benefited most from the introduction of these technologies. Similarly, markets such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are adopting high frequency trading in a big way. India cannot afford to be left behind in this context. The same goes for the leading brokerages in the Indian markets. It takes a trading desk between six months to a year to fine-tune its electronic trading capabilities. The longer the delay in getting the buy-in to do so, the lower the chance of success and indeed survival. The buy-side also has to be decisive and quick in its approach. Moving on to some of the other presentations in the event, there were useful inputs given into the issues that are cropping up in terms of the infrastructure for electronic trading. While NSE has a fast matching engine, the rest of the infrastructure has a long way to go. As pointed out, in Indian centers outside Mumbai the contrast between Indian and international capabilities is even more stark and communication networks have been found lacking. Data quality is also something that brokers, especially the smaller ones are struggling with. In this scenario, it is important that India opens up its markets to globally renowned vendors, while at the same time encouraging its local IT firms to also compete in the market. The Indian market is large enough for a number of firms to participate and be able to meet the various requirements for electronic trading.