Mumbai brokerage blames 'technical issues' for share fall

A Mumbai brokerage on Saturday blamed technical problems for "unintended" stock market transactions, a day after there was an unexpected dive in the values of the shares of two major companies. The statement came after India's National Stock Exchange (NSE) said on Friday that it would investigate what had prompted the surprise 10-percent plunge in the shares of Tata Motors and UltraTech Cement. "Due to some technical issues in the software, unintended transactions got executed. There was no broker error and no loss to any clients," Religare Capital Markets said in a statement. Shares of both Tata Motors and UltraTech Cement slid suddenly about half an hour before the market closed but they clawed back most of their losses within one to two minutes, dealers said. Religare said the incident was being "investigated by the software supplier", adding that it had "discussed the matter with exchange officials". The statement did not specify whether the unusual price movements involving Tata Motors and UltraTech Cement were carried out by Religare. There was no immediate comment available from NSE which said on Friday that it would investigate whether a trading error had caused the fall in the stock prices. India's market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, in December imposed order limits and tighter risk-management controls at stock exchanges to prevent free-falls or price manipulation by brokers. This was in response to a more than 900-point "flash crash" on the NSE's benchmark Nifty index two months earlier, caused by erroneous trading orders which forced a brief halt to trading.