Despite the unwarranted negative publicity that the Bombay Stock Exchange, the country's premier stock exchange, has been getting for the last few days, what many people do not know is that the exchange has notched up a notable achievement.

Late last month, it became the world's first stock exchange to launch exchange enabled system for Internet trading, BSEwebx.com. The inaugural trade, using the new medium, was placed by Mr. Promod Mahajan, the mercurial minister of information technology, who described it as a golden day in the history of stock exchanges of India.

He said, "It is a matter of pride that for the first time there is a stock exchange in the entire world, which has established a centralised system of Internet trading for all its members." Mr Mahajan however cautioned that unless the transfer of money for such transactions was as fast, this kind of Internet-based trading would not be complete.

Mr Mahajan struck hard at those who doubted the success of Internet and said that net is the medium of the future. He said it had taken only 4 years for the internet to reach the 50 million mark as against the radio, which took 31 years to reach its first 50 million people and the television which took 13 years to reach the 5 million mark.

While accepting that the Internet epidemic is catching on in this country, he conceded that for Internet to be really successful the government had to work towards providing a lot of power, bandwidth and human resources. "These three will make the IT triangle complete", said Mr Mahajan adding that the government had already provided legal sanctity to the language of the computer.

The Securities & Exchange Board of India (Sebi) chief, Mr. D.R. Mehta, said that net trading was fast becoming popular around the world and South Korea topped the list of countries in net trading. He said 60 per cent of trading in Korea was through the net and daily trades often crossed the 6 billion mark.

Mr Anand Rathi, president, BSE told domain-b, "The need for introducing online driven trading culminated from the fact that 32 per cent of total transactions in the USA and 40 per cent to 45 per cent of total transactions in Europe were net-based. He said net-based trading will lead to lower transaction costs and an efficient trading system which in turn will strengthen our capital markets, so necessary for raising resources and capital formation."

BSEwebx.com provides trading opportunities through the Internet to all of its members, facilitating content, Internet trading, payment and depository interfaces under one roof. A unique combination of two massive networks, the BSE private network and the Internet, BSEwebx.com offers huge amounts of content to investors, who can see the market through various views like toppers/losers/circuit shares and index movements amongst others.

The broker, on the other hand, can use the system to define the risk profile of the investor including exposure limits for buy/sell, scrip wise exposures, categories to trade, type of scrips and finally carry forward or delivery. Investors can place an order on any of the scrip as per his/her risk management profile in Webx and if the order is within the limits set, it is sent to BOLT for execution. If, on the other hand, it violates the risk profile and the rules, it is then either rejected or sent to broker system for real-time review and release. The investor is kept informed of his/her order status at each and every stage until execution, who has the option to modify or even cancel the order before it is executed.

Said Mr Rathi, "BSEwebx.com, an amalgamation of domain knowledge & experience equipped with futuristic technology, will no doubt bring in more empowerment and better service focus among all links of the Indian capital market value chain."