134 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast March 5th, 2022

 Transcript:   This week in the parish of bourses and market structure:        Indian stocks now settle on a T+1 cycle while Indian scandals are settling on T+ forever as the Holy Hoax colo scandal rages on… My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business weekly digest. It’s the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast Episode 134. Good day ladies and gentlemen, this is a very brief reduction of highlights amongst the key headlines from the week in market structure. All the analysis of the many events of the past seven days can be found in Exchange Invest’s daily subscriber newsletter, the unique guide to the bourse business sent daily to your inbox. More details at ExchangeInvest.com. In what the Hindu newspaper has aptly termed “the Holy Hoax” NSE’s co-lo scandal took on a yet more bizarre turn this week when India’s CBI determined that the Himalayan mystic guiding when NSE CEO, was in fact none other than Anand Subramanian, the controversial beneficiary of Chitra Ramkrishna’s promotions… Hence at least it may now be clear just why the guru kept recommending the elevation of Subramanian in the NSE hierarchy.  Indian media went gaga once again at this arrest and promptly showed a photo of former NSE CEO Ravi Narain labelled as Subramanian himself. At least they haven’t mixed up Chitra Ramkrishna… yet.  Anyway, determining that the Himalayan “yogi” who proposed employment and pay rises for Anand Subramanian was in fact Anand Subramanian took the CBI longer than a builder can knock a hole in the wall but it was still impressive work compared to, say the resolution of the NSEL fiasco. Naturally, the Subramanian laptop appears to be missing too… And that raised questions over at the multi-commodity exchange where there may be similar data storage issues pertaining to many Indian exchanges, where there’s been a penchant for destroying executive laptops, data and all and indeed, in the case of Mr Subramanian, it seems his laptop is currently missing. On a happier exchange note the stock markets this week rolled out a T+1 settlement cycle in India, which regulators SEBI had permitted last September. Indian scandals, frauds and suchlike will continue such as NSEL to be settled on a T+forever basis, we presume.  However, one side effect of the NSE co lo holy hoax could be the very notion of the stock exchange duopoly concentration which has long been favoured by SEBI.  Today the National Stock Exchange of India commands a breathtaking market share of 93% in cash equities, 100% of cash equity futures, 94% of equity options and well by comparison only 73% still a crushing monopoly of currency derivatives apart from NSE investors and traders have really only one solid option – the BSE (former Bombay Stock Exchange).  Now, I have long railed against the SEBI policy to extinguish exchange competition in India by essentiall...