Mubasher: The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) will join a race to introduce derivatives as Gulf bourses including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia put strategies in place to attract more investors.
The UAE stock market has planned for launching trading of futures contracts on single stocks in 2019, Bloomberg reported.
The futures contracts might be available for the benchmark ADX General Index, CEO of Abu Dhabi’s exchange Rashed Al Blooshi said on Monday in an interview with Bloomberg, without specifying any starting dates.
Last week, the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) announced it will introduce index-futures trading in 2019, with the contracts and options on single stocks expected to be available by 2020, Bloomberg added.
“Investors can already trade futures on United Arab Emirates company stocks listed on the Nasdaq Dubai exchange, but liquidity is thin,” according to Bloomberg.
In Kuwait, the derivatives are expected to be part of the reforms plan being undertaken in the country; this may result in the exchange’s upgrade to emerging-markets status at MSCI Inc in 2019.
“Abu Dhabi’s main stock gauge has jumped more than 13% this year, with banks contributing the most to the gain because of mergers and acquisitions. The performance compares to a drop of about 12% for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index,” according to Bloomberg.
