One of the most fascinating things to watch over the last couple of days, besides Kemboi shaking his waist, has been the Knight Capital Saga. A computer Glitch last week cost the US market maker USD 440 Million(KES 37.7 Billion).This figure is 152 percent of its second quarter total revenue and 13,233.33% more than their Earnings for the second quarter. Speak about a costly computer glitch. The software that brought Knight Capital to its knees was a new software. It was brought to the market to exploit a new Wall Street venue for stock trading. The software was rushed onto the platform late Tuesday night and within twenty minutes of Wednesday morning’s opening bell Knight Frank had stopped it. The software had been tested for six months before it was rolled out and its technical specifications were available 240 days prior to launch, yet even this wasn’t enough.
It seems like only yesterday when we had our own computer glitch with a KES10.7 Billion“typing error” in the supplementary budget 2009. While we pressure the NSE to actively pursue online trading platforms the question we must ask ourselves is do we really have the capacity for it?
Speaking to Bloomberg Knight CEO, Tom Joyce, put it best “Technology breaks. It isn’t good, we don’t look forward to it; but technology breaks.” Especially in Kenya. In a country where our power infrastructure is about as reliable as depending on 100 monkeys to write you Shakespeare and our ISPs waiting for the most opportune moment to interrupt our internet connection, what are the odds that we will be able to have 99% uptime? Speaking from personal experience even the ATMs are a gamble. What would be our security?
Furthermore let’s assume that we managed to get the uptime working. The whole point of online trading would be to have instant traders and make the market Dynamic. It currently takes the better part of 4 days for any trade to be effected in the NSE. What would be the point of instant access if the transaction itself is going to take forever and a day? Maybe online trading isn’t the way for us to go.