JAKARTA, March 3 (Reuters) - Indonesia's financial
services authority will ease some pandemic-era rules for the
stock market, including on trading hours and short-selling, it
said in a letter to investors.
The agency known as OJK had imposed the temporary rules at
the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to protect the market
against volatility.
Inarno Djajadi, head of capital markets supervision at OJK
said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on
Friday, that the regulator will not extend the rules beyond the
end of this month as the government removed all
coronavirus-related mobility restrictions late last year.
An official at the regulator authenticated the letter, but
declined to comment further.
According to the letter, from April the regulator will allow
short-selling to resume for a list of stocks where it was
previously suspended. The threshold at which trading is halted
will be raised from the current 5% drop in the main index to a
10% drop.
The regulator will also bring back in stages pre-pandemic
auto-rejection rules, which limits how much share prices can go
up or down in a day.
Due to high volatility during the pandemic, the exchange had
restricted the bottom limit so that transactions are rejected
when share prices fall by 7%, while the upper limit was
unchanged.
This will revert to normal from April, bringing the bottom
auto-reject threshold to 20% to 35%, depending on share price
levels.
The letter also said trading hours would be adjusted to
match the central bank's settlement timings.
It was not immediately clear whether this meant market close
would revert to 4 p.m. Jakarta time (0900 GMT), as it was before
the pandemic. Currently the market closes at 3 p.m.
(Reporting by Stefanno Sulaiman; Editing by Gayatri Suroyo,
Kanupriya Kapoor)
