Share prices on the Cambodia Securities Exchange yesterday fell for the first time since trading began a week ago, as technical problems reportedly caused a 90 per cent drop in the amount of shares traded.

Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority shares dropped 4.9 per cent to 9,700 riel (US$2.44).

The daily increase and decrease in price is capped at 5 per cent, however the value and number of shares traded yesterday fell by about 90 per cent after the CSX’s second-biggest day of trading on Monday.

There were 54,735 PPWSA shares worth $132,236 traded yesterday, down from the 542,994 shares worth $1.38 million on Monday.

A buyer-side glitch may have contributed to the drop.

Sorn Sokna, CEO at Sonatra Securities, yesterday’s top trader, reported that technical problems between broker and client accounts led to substantially fewer shares traded.

“I had many clients wanting to buy yesterday, but they could not transfer money into accounts. [The CSX] did not see the demand,” he said.

Without the glitch, the price would not have fallen as it did, Sorn Sokna said.

Some 395,000 shares worth of trades went unexecuted on the exchange yesterday.

Several other brokers said they were unaware of a technical problem on the buyer side, although Tong Yang Securities said a glitch occurred between personal accounts and trading accounts on the first day of trading.

Han Kyung-tae, Tong Yang’s country representative, said he was surprised by the unbalance in the market yesterday and that technical problems could have been the cause.

The glitch last Wednesday had been masked by a large volume of trading and hardly noticed, Han Kyung-tae said.

At the time of reporting late yesterday, the CSX had not sent a notice informing brokers of a buyer-side technical problem, Porn Chalit, head of equity at SBI Royal Securities, said.

Representatives at the CSX did not respond to requests for comment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Don Weinland at [email protected]