September 02 2015

HanzaTrade

My startup crowdfunding platform HanzaTrade has been nominated for a Polish e-commcerce award – If you do Facebook & would like to support us, your vote will be welcome – Please hit the Word “Głosuję” to support HanzaTrade. I am delighted for our COO Beata & all the team as we continue to build on community crowdfunding initiatives.

Welcome NASDAQ

I am delighted to welcome the good folks of NASDAQ advertising within Exchange Invest, promoting their new energy market. I exhort you all to have a look at their offering.

Thanks as always to our sponsors, led by the great folks of Cinnober whose first mover advantage isn’t just in technology… Right now the fine names on the lhs of this text plus our corporate subscribers to Premium, are paying the salaries of Florin, Krzysztof and the team producing Exchange Invest for free for readers daily around the world. I’m doing this free and subsidising it too with other income. Everywhere I go, I hear great feedback about Exchange Invest as the world’s benchmark read for exchanges & market infrastructure. That’s great but, even deploying the Blockchain, love still doesn’t pay the bills. More sponsors, Premium subscribers and commercial interactions will be welcome, so we can accelerate the rollout of other products in the space too.

Hmmm, linking those threads together, perhaps it’s time to crowdfund sponsors/advertisers & commercial interactions via HanzaTrade for Exchange Invest…

Meanwhile, if you want to get a flavour of the debate upcoming at Young Markets, my conference on the future of finance in Warsaw September 17th, check out the latest Premium Post: Technology On The Edge.

…and don’t forget to register for Burgenstock with its all star line up beginning with Crossfire September 23rd.

Public Markets

Germany, France, Britain Call For Rethink Of New EU Securities Rules
Huw Jones – Reuters

Germany, France and Britain are seeking amendments to new EU rules that aim to increase transparency in bond trading, arguing that the current proposals could have negative unintended consequences for investors and markets.

In a joint letter to the European Commission the three countries said the rule changes now proposed could result in “significant negative implications for the proper functioning of these vital markets”.

PLY: In what marks a great leap forward for inter-blob relations at EU level, I am unconvinced either party is right here.

MCX: Out Of The Jignesh Shah Shadow
Salil Panchal – Forbes

MCX appears to have moved beyond the Jignesh Shah-scandal hangover. New credible investors, fresh associations and a clear direction is giving India’s only listed exchange a fresh lease of life.

PLY: I hope MCX can thrive once again. Amidst the welter of Shahdenfreude, this exchange is not given decent credit for delivering a remarkable platform for risk transfer and speculation which helped make India a better place. I know many find it hard to stomach Jignesh Shah but he got MCX spectacularly right building on his success with the original FTIL front end / connectivity tools.

Italy Joins T2S After Two Month Delay
John Brazier – Waters Technology

LSE announced CSD Monte Titoli and its clients had successfully completed migration to the T2S platform, the long-running project by ECB designed to create a harmonized European settlements landscape. Originally scheduled to join alongside Romania (Depozitarul Central), Malta (Malta SE), Switzerland (SIX SIS) and Greece (BoGS) when the platform launched in late June, the Italian market stalled when Monte Titoli expressed concern over the platform testing and requested an extension prior to joining.

TWSE Expands Cooperation With JPX
FTSE GM

Taiwan SE (TWSE) and JPX are set to expand their international links with the listing of the first leveraged and inverse ETFs tracking the benchmark TOPIX index on TWSE in the near future.

Nadex Plans To Waive Trading, Settlement Fees For Select Members
Maria Nikolova – LeapRate

Fees are poised to be waived for all individuals and entities that become Nadex Members on or after the launch date of a special program, set to start no earlier than September 16, 2015.

North American Derivatives Exchange (Nadex) is part of IG Group Holdings.

PLY: Good to hear news from NADEX which is in the midst of that throng of challenger exchanges many of us forget about.

Chinese Brokerages Increase Stock Buying Funds, Answering Beijing’s Call
Pete Sweeney & Samuel Shen – Reuters

Guotai Junan Securities, Changjiang Securities and Pacific Securities all said they will increase the size of their equity trading funds to 20% of net assets, up from 15% currently.

Private Markets

BIST CEO Looks To Lead Turkey To A Brighter Future
Stefanie Linhardt – The Banker

BIST’s recent mergers with a series of other exchanges in Turkey have expanded its remit and influence significantly. New CEO, Tuncay Dinc, hopes the bourse will lead both Istanbul’s ambitions to become a major financial centre and Turkey’s efforts to become a top 10 global economy.

DMCC Signs MoU With BIST
Matthew Amlôt – CPI Financial

NSE Launches Scheme To Reward Members On Governance Standards
The Economic Times

The new scheme has been launched on a pilot basis for trades done in currency futures in currency derivatives segment.

The NSE MORE scheme would be effective for a period from September 1, this year to March 31, 2016.

Shenzhen SE Signs A Cooperation Agreement With China Development Bank
MondoVisione

OKCoin Stops Accepting Deposits From US
Sarah Jenn – newsbtc

OKCoin decided to stop accepting deposits from US customers due to regulatory pressure. However, the Chinese bitcoin exchange said that this measure will just be temporary.

Special Section: FTI, NSEL, India at the Crossroads

PLY: MCX flat, Moon Men falling out of orbit, down 4.5%.

NSEL Investor Group Asks Sebi To Probe FTIL Role In NSEL Scam
Ashish Rukhaiyar & Ami Shah – Livemint

PLY: For those who think a perpetual motion system is impossible, it seems to be alive in many Indian court actions which somehow miraculously just keep circulating without any danger of resolution…

Read our Premium NSEL Scandal Brief – Part 16.

Technology

MOEX- Trading Interruption On Equity & Bond Market On Tuesday
Maria Nikolova – LeapRate

Trading in shares and bonds was suspended at 14:59 MSK as a result of an outage. At 15:35 MSK the trading system was fixed, and clients were allowed to remove orders. Trading on the market resumed at 15:55 MSK. FX Market and Derivatives Market were unaffected and operated as usual.

Last month MOEX announced the SPECTRA system updated to v4.5.

BNY Mellon Update On Fund Accounting Issue
MondoVisione

BNY Mellon has completed production of system-generated NAVs for all ETFs and mutual funds through Monday, August 31, 2015. To meet month end processing deadlines, certain clients elected to use alternative NAV production methodologies for Monday, August 31st.

PLY: Catastrophically embarrassing – a little asterisk will forever plague the reputation of BNY Mellon noting that clients had to use their own pocket calculator / abacus to work out NAV.

See also the New Premium Post: Technology On The Edge. We are at a certain point of inflection – and it isn’t singularity.

Nasdaq To Sell Surveillance Technology To China (subscription)
Gregor Stuart Hunter – Wall Street Journal

Nasdaq said it will provide market surveillance to a Chinese securities exchange and some mainland financial firms.

PLY: A bumper start to the SMARTS biennial client conference in Hong Kong.

Uganda SE Launches Automated Trading System
Mugerwa Michael – New Vision

Read our Premium Rise of Africa Brief – Part 5.

An Open Letter To The Bitcoin Community From The Developers
Bitcoin Magazine

This is a letter to the community written and signed by many of the Bitcoin developers, including the most prolific contributors to (at least) three separate implementations of the Bitcoin system. Signers of this letter represent about 90% of the commits in the last year or two to Bitcoin Core, according to Greg Maxwell.

As active contributors to Bitcoin, we share this letter to communicate our plan of action related to technical consensus and Bitcoin scalability.

PLY: Interesting letter insofar as we see a lot of potential splits in the politics of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Foundation is increasingly under duress as various changes are taking place (albeit the chain expansion plan appears to be gaining traction).

SETL’s Peter Randall Says Banks & Blockchains Are All About Payments

Ian Allison – IBT

Peter Randall and Anthony Culligan, founder of P2P bitcoin trading site Roolo, have launched SETL, which will use blockchain technology to transform the post trade space the way Chi-X transformed the trading space.

PLY: Good luck to them too. There’s a lot of crunchy stuff to be discussed in the land of Bitcoin at the next Young Markets in Warsaw on September 17th, register here.

Barclays Cites Bitcoin’s Potential In Rolling Out Cryptocurrency
Anthony Cuthbertson – IBT

Barclays has announced that it will start testing bitcoin, citing the digital currency’s “potential to change financial services”.

Products

HFT: Bond Market Scourge Or Saviour ? (subscription)
Joe Rennison – Financial Times

PLY: Again as per the letter which begins today’s bulletin, the answer is neither, really.

Career Paths

Further to the announcement on 13 April 2015 (reported here), ICAP announced that Stuart Bridges has commenced his role as Group Finance Director with effect from 1 September 2015.

The BoD of SIX appointed Jürg Weber as the new Division CEO of SIX Payment Services and thus also as a member of SIX Group Executive Board.

Financial Calendar

02.09.2015 – Record date NZX 3.0 cents interim dividend

04.09.2015 – Record date CBOE $0.23 dividend

04.09.2015 – TMX $0.40 dividend payment

04.09.2015 – BGC Partners’ BoD $0.14 quarterly dividend payment

All forthcoming exchange / investment related events are now listed in our Events page.

Crowdfunding

China P2P Lending Rises To Record US$15.3b
Leng Cheng – Shanghai Daily

HanzaTrade Nominated for Polish e-Commerce Award
HanzaTrade

HanzaTrade, the community crowdfunding platform based in Torun, Poland, at the centre of the Mission ToRun startup ecosystem has been nominated in the 2015 Polish e-commerce awards. HanzaTrade is owned by Exchange Invest Founder & Publisher Patrick L Young.

PLY: If you do Facebook & would like to support us, your vote will be welcome – Please hit the Word “Głosuję” to support.