China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) is planning to launch an information system to facilitate trading in its block execution market, according to an interview with Geng Liang, governor of the SSE, in Shanghai Securities News, a Chinese financial newspaper.
Geng said the SSE was developing an information platform to make it easier for counterparties to locate one another.
The move follows increasing volumes on SSE’s block trading market. Geng said share trading volume on the block platform had increased tenfold year-on-year in 2008, with transaction volume growing twelve-fold.
While the exchange has operated the platform for more than five years, Geng said block trading picked up in 2008 thanks to investors’ growing appreciation of the trading technique and guidance from the China Securities Regulatory Commission, issued in April 2008, aimed at encouraging shareholders to transfer shares for which the sales limits have terminated. This transfer can be effected through an exchange’s block trading market.
In addition to the block trading information service, the SSE is also planning to launch exchange-traded fund products based on the SHSE-SZSE300 index.