The JSE has played down an error that incorrectly represented foreign sellers of equities as net buyers of R98,1bn of local stocks.
The JSE said that instead of foreigners investing a net R98,1bn in South African portfolios between May and 20 July, these foreigners were net sellers of a cumulative R36,4bn during the period.
Furthermore, the JSE said these foreigners were buyers of just R50m in July to date.
The bourse blamed the error on a computer programming problem which impacted the manner in which data was extracted from core transactional systems.
But the JSE corrected the glitch on 21 July and has apologised for the error.
“This is unfortunate and as soon as we found out that we had an error, we addressed it immediately and corrected it,” Leanne Parsons, director of information services at the JSE, said by phone.
“As we’ve indicated, this doesn’t affect any of our core systems and the transactional data that resides in those core systems is completely accurate,” said Parsons.
Parsons further explained that the error only relates to those “particular statistics” of non-residents and that the incorrect data came about due to a system update.
“It was correctly programmed initially but there was an improvement made to help performance and unfortunately, inadvertently, it didn’t translate into exactly the same program being implemented,” Parsons said.
“This was another program that essentially extracts data out of their other systems just to do this particular non-resident calculation. So, it wouldn’t impact any of the JSE’s core systems,” Parsons said.
Parsons also played down the impact of the error by saying that she didn’t expect it to negatively impact the market or even the South African rand.
“It may be important information that the market may look to use, but it’s unlikely in our view that this would be used for investment decisions,” Parsons said.
The markets seem to have ignored the miscalculation, with the JSE All Share index gaining 1,1% to 53 579 points by 12pm and the rand trading hardly changed at R14,31/US$.
“This is the first time that we are aware that we’ve had any error in our non-resident equity stats,” Parsons added.
Meanwhile, Sasfin Securities’ deputy chairman, David Shapiro, said investors and traders should not be alarmed by the JSE’s computer glitch.
Shapiro said the real cash that flows will reflect in prices of shares, the rand and bond yields. “That’s already there,” said Shapiro.
