Middle East & Africa

Citigroup is expanding its equities team in central and eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa with a series of hires across sales, execution, research and equity derivatives.

The Istanbul Stock Exchange has published a raft of new practices to be introduced across the remainder of the year that are intended to improve liquidity on the country's equity markets.

Complex event processing provider StreamBase has struck a partnership with trading technology firm Peresys to facilitate electronic access to Africa.

Middle Eastern trading venue the Qatar Exchange has migrated cash equities trading to global exchange group NYSE Euronext's Universal Trading Platform as part of an ongoing drive to transform Doha into a major global financial centre.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued a no-action letter which permits the offer and sale of a futures contract based on Turkey's blue-chip stock index.

NCB Capital, a Saudi Arabian asset management and investment firm, has become the latest Middle East company to implement technology vendor Fidessa's sell-side trading platform.

The Dubai Financial Services Authority, regulator of the Dubai International Financial Centre, has given approval for stock exchange Nasdaq Dubai to migrate its trading onto the trading platform of Dubai Financial Market (DFM), the emirate's principal stock exchange.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange's (JSE) equity derivatives market has introduced maker-taker pricing in a billing model change launched by the exchange on 5 July 2010.

SunGard has added the derivatives market of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to its ASP-based connectivity service for sell-side firms, Valdi Market Access.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) says it intends to introduce a new block trading service, Block X, which will offer anonymous execution of large trades via the hidden order functionality of the exchange’s central order book.