MUMBAI, Oct 30: The Over-the-Counter Exchange of India (OTCEI) has got off to a slow but sure start with the exchange witnessing an average daily turnover of Rs 1.36 crore in the first week of its restructured operations.The daily volumes in terms of number of shares averaged about 80,000. The turnover on the exchange had come down from a few lakh in March to a few thousands in the month of May this year. In fact, trading at the exchange was virtually negligible by the month of July.``We feel that trading will increase further as the demat option becomes available on OTCEI. OTCEI has applied to NSDL to get the demat option which will still take 10-15 days to come through. This will give a further impetus to trading on the exchange going up by 3-4 times from the current levels, as a number of big brokers and financial institutions are keeping away due to the demat option not being available,'' said the managing director of OTCEI, Joseph Bosco.
On the day of the Muhurat, October 19 and on October 22,trading was done for two hours with a turnover of 50,025 and 45,145 shares, respectively. The first day of full trading On October 23 (Friday) saw a trading of 67,535 shares while 58,955 shares were traded on October 26, 1,03,610 on October 27, 1,06,440 shares on October 28 and 57,955 shares on October 29.
``Volumes were high at the counters of SBI, Rolta, Infosys, Bajaj Auto, Castrol, ICICI, HDFC, Satyam Computers, BOB, BSES, Pentafour Software, Videocon International, Godrej, Oriental Bank and Raymond, among others.
Another development is that brokers are buying OTCEI cards at par (Rs 6 lakh) or at a slight discount, as against earlier when the cards were not fetching even Rs 1 lakh on the secondary market. An average number of 58 brokers logged on to the OTCEI screen in the past one week compared to around 10 brokers earlier,'' said Bosco.
OTCEI is also adding around 30 scrips to its permitted segment from Monday onwards, which will comprise of 8-10 regional scrips and other small scrips from BSE.``We will keep on adding few scrips every month to our permitted segment to increase the scope of trading on OTCEI,'' said Bosco.
OTCEI has identified more than 500 scrips which will be put on the permitted segment of the exchange. These include about 364 existing blue chips at the National Stock Exchange (NSE), about 257 additional NSE scrips (107 were in the permitted category of NSE which is now dead), about 100 B1 and B2 group stocks listed at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and about 40 scrips which are regional in nature. All these securities will be put on the permitted category.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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