Kathmandu, March 1

The government is preparing to extend the share trading time by one hour. Currently, transactions of shares listed at the Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) are conducted from 11am to 3pm from Sunday to Thursday.

Since the share market has been on a bullish trend since the last couple of months, the Securities Board of Nepal (SEBON) — the regulatory body of the capital and commodities market — has written a letter to Nepse asking it to extend the business hours by an hour from 10:30 am to 3:30 pm.

Chandra Singh Saud, chief executive officer of Nepse, informed they are doing necessary preparations to extend the time by one hour a day. “We have held several rounds of discussions on the issue and will soon finalise procedure.”

Saud further said that it will take some time to manage the CDS and Clearing software so as to make it compatible with the Nepse software for settlement of shares that have been traded. The daily business hours at the secondary bourse can only be extended after holding consultations with YCO, the company that developed software for both Nepse and CDS and Clearing.

The secondary market at present is in a bullish trend with records being broken every other week. However, share investors have complained to SEBON that the time needed for transactions which have grown manifold is too less. Hence, the board has written to Nepse to extend trading time to address the demand of investors.

Meanwhile, the country’s sole secondary market saw a record buying pressure today. However, the market dropped by 2.50 per cent or 40.82 points today to close at 1,591.36 points. The sensitive index also went down by 2.03 per cent or 7.04 points to 340.64 points and the float index descended by 2.29 per cent or 2.65 points to 113.05 points.

Altogether, 12.52 million shares of 183 companies were traded through 39,289 transactions today that amounted to Rs 4.85 billion, which was the highest ever trade on a single day in the history of Nepse.