In a first, brokerage platform makes downtime data available real-time

FYERS' CEO and co-founder Tejas Khoday pointed out, there tends to be a lot of misinformation when there is a platform outage, and this can worsen panic among traders.

In a first, a brokerage has decided to display its platform's uptime and downtime on a near real-time basis.

FYERS has added a tab to their website (status.fyers.in) where traders can track the performance of their platform's various functions — trading (order placements), market data feed, login and exchange connectivity. The performance will be tracked with a lag of 2 to 5 minutes.

With increasing complaints from traders about financial losses suffered from tech issues on their brokerage platform, such a tracker should be welcome.

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Tejas Khoday, CEO and co-founder of FYERS, told Moneycontrol that this should go some way in combating misinformation and mass panic.

"The dashboard is meant to track mission-critical services that affect many traders at the same time," he said. With this dashboard, people could do better risk management and save money, according to him.

"If a trading platform is down, customers try to reach out to their brokers through email or phone. At such times, the broker's customer support department is overwhelmed and is unable to give that response. Then the traders start to act in panic, place more orders... they become victims of the situation. The better way to handle would be to make the information (of the downtime of the service) available to them and they can simply operate their backup brokerage account, which may not be facing this issue," he explained.

"It can help save a lot of money because most people are trading in the derivative market and any outage can lead to serious P&L consequences," he said.

As Khoday pointed out, there tends to be a lot of misinformation when there is a platform outage. This can worsen the mass panic and push traders to make bad decisions. "There is no sense of accountability so far. We thought we should do something to change that," he said.

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Of course, it could make a broker more vulnerable to legal action because a trader could cite the platform's downtime for losses caused. Khoday believes that that is a risk worth taking because, in the long term, it will keep investors' trust in the platform.