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Brokers gather to protest
08-11-2008 14:03
Brokers at the Istanbul Stock Exchange, or IMKB, refused to step onto the trading floor Friday in protest of a new arrangement by the Capital Markets Board, or SPK, that could leave hundreds of brokers jobless.
About 600 brokers who work at the exchange face unemployment when the system shifts to “remote trading,” with regulations that will come into effect Jan. 1.
Hundreds of brokers stayed outside the IMKB building Friday morning. Hüseyin Erkan, president of the IMKB, spoke with brokers and journalists. “In terms of infrastructure, we are ready (for remote trading),” he said. “The (new arrangement) requires brokers to send orders from their own systems. Thus, there would be no need for session floors. IMKB is a bourse that can be reached from everywhere in the globe.But we still wanted to have a session floor, utilizing a minimum number of brokers.”
The bourse is trying to implement a decision that every intermediary institution have two brokers on the floor, but some institutions do not want to send brokers, while others want to send more than two.
Denying that hundreds of brokers might be laid off due to the new arrangement, Erkan said many people had already left. Before remote trading existed, there were 1,200 brokers on the floor, but after the arrangement was created, the number fell to 400. "800 people have already gone,” he said.
To support existing brokers, Erkan said the bourse wished to continue with at least one trading floor. This will require 208 on-the-floor brokers, he noted.
“If the SPK decides to postpone its decision (to implement the arrangement), we will be happy,” he said.
Nearly 95 percent of orders to buy or sell come through remote systems, said Erkan. Floor brokers account for 5 percent of orders which have a 15 percent share of the total transaction volume.
This does not diminish the role of brokers, as “capital markets cannot develop without session floors and comments by brokers,” he added.
Erkan’s comments were frequently welcomed by applause from brokers.
Speaking to the Anatolia News Agency, broker Kadri Kalabalık said many of his colleagues have been working at the floor since they were 20-years-old and it would be nearly impossible to find another job. Pointing toward statues in the garden of the IMKB, Kalabalık said they were dedicated to brokers who had died on the floor. “Some brokers died of cardiac arrest here at 40,” he said, indicating the floor's significance to many brokers.
Turkish Daily News
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