The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) plans to introduce a new high-speed index dissemination service with the aim of calculating and distributing price information for TOPIX and other target indices.
Scheduled for launch on 28 February 2011, the service recalculates each time a price change on the index occurs, at the millisecond-level. It will also include calculation and delivery of new best bid quote and best offer quote indices.
The move is part of a series of measures taken by the TSE in the last 12 months to make the exchange more attractive to market participants, particularly high-frequency traders. In January 2010, the exchange introduced Arrowhead, its new low-latency trading platform. It has also recently introduced a remote membership scheme for Hong Kong-based broker-dealers to trade directly in Japan.
The changes to the TSE have been motivated in part by increased competition on the Japanese markets, following the introduction of proprietary trading systems (PTS) such as Chi-X Japan, which launched in July 2010. These alternative trading platforms have not seriously threatened the TSE's dominance yet – according to market data vendor Thomson Reuters it retained a 93.7% market share by volume in December 2010, while Osaka Securities Exchange made up 4.9%, leaving the PTS share at 1.4% of overall market volume.