Kathmandu, December 27

The Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) started displaying the market depth of listed companies on its website from today to facilitate common investors of the capital market.

Earlier, only the broker companies benefited from this facility. A recently issued directive of the Securities Board of Nepal (SEBON) — regulator of the securities market in the country — had instructed Nepse to make the information available on its website for public consumption. SEBON Chairman Rewat Bahadur Karki said that it is the ordinary investors who stand to gain from this arrangement because big investors were already getting this information easily from the broker companies.

Market depth is an electronic list of buy and sell orders, organised by price level and updated to reflect real-time market activity. It displays information about the prices at which traders are willing to buy and sell a particular trading symbol at a single point in time.

Traders can see the quantity and price of buy and sell orders waiting to be executed in the trading platform. This arrangement will be supportive in determining the competitive price of the securities as it shows where the price is now and they can easily assume the price in the near future,

according to Karki.

Ordinary investors can put their ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ order by obtaining the information of a particular trading symbol from the market depth. For instance, if we take a particular trading symbol like ‘ADBL’ — Agricultural Development Bank Ltd — for today. There was a maximum selling order of 600 scrips at a price of Rs 513, while maximum buying order was for 500 scrips at a price of Rs 496. So, an investor can look at this particular information and make an informed decision.

SEBON had previously also instructed broker firms to arrange a separate trading window dedicated for the physically challenged people, women and children at the earliest.