Normal trading should resume, but what's 'normal'?

NOW that the dust has settled on last week's trading system glitch which disrupted trading on Wednesday, the market here can get back to normal. Or at least everyone hopes so, because what exactly "normal" means for the local market is difficult to say. By itself, the word implies a market with activity and interest where people go to trade and there's plenty exchange ideas but in recent months "normal" has come to represent rather dull trading marked by low volatility, low volume with most of the action focused on only a handful of stocks at any one time.

So what does "normal" really mean for the Singapore stock market? As it stands today, it encompasses many other meanings, one of the more noticeable being a decoupling from regional leaders Tokyo and Hong Kong most of the time, and from global leader Wall Street some of the time.

This disconnection from overseas leaders may be dismaying to those who would have liked to trade on the volatility that spills over here from those markets but, for those players with less risk tolerance, it would probably come as a relief.