Witnessing close to ONE Million contracts valued at almost USD 30 billion traded in the first quarter of 2012, Singapore Mercantile Exchange (SMX) - SMX is Asia’ s first multi-product global commodity derivatives exchange. Offering a state of the art electronic platform for trading futures and options contracts, SMX aims to synchronise derivatives and physical tra" href="javascript:void(0)">SMX has grown over 20-fold compared to the same period last year. From a mere volume of 37,088 contracts traded in the first quarter of 2011, the Exchange’ s trading volume rose to 865,249 contracts for the corresponding period in 2012.
Product innovation has facilitated SMX in achieving growth across its various categories of products. SMX witnessed growth especially in its launch of uniquely designed contracts in base metals, agriculture commodities and indices categories - Copper, Black Pepper and Iron Ore Index, as well as from contracts such as Gold and Euro-USD where contract specifications and trading hours had been refined. These new products and revised contracts constitute a major share of more than 75% in SMX’ s overall volumes with a turnover of USD 87,951.37 million.
Since its launch in Feb’ 12, the Black Pepper contract has already traded over 45,000 MT. The Copper contracts achieved a turnover of over 2,000,000 MT constituting about one fifth of the traded volumes during the last nine months, while the Iron Ore index contracts witnessed volumes of 8,520,400 tons in the same period.
The revised Gold & Euro-USD contracts found traction with the trading community and the efforts have paid off handsomely. Volumes in Gold and Euro-USD contracts grew by 26 times and 18 times respectively in the first quarter of 2012, compared to the corresponding period last year with only 321 and 29,198 contracts. During the last nine months, trading in Gold has significantly increased with total turnover at 1,400,000 oz, while Euro-USD being the largest traded contract of the Exchange witnessed a turnover of EURO 33.71 billion in the same period.
With more than a dozen contracts to offer, SMX is seeing growing interest from various quarters such as physical market participants, exporters, importers, hedgers and investors.
The overall increase in the number of active participants has grown three-fold from a year ago.
Source: Commodities Now