Monday, January 11, 2010

World economy getting back to normal

BASEL, Switzerland (AFP) - – Emerging economies are driving a global economic recovery, the head of the ECB said Monday after central bankers concluded that the world economy was returning to normality.

"At a global level ... there is a confirmation of the progressive normalisation of the economy," European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet said on behalf of the central bank chiefs.

During their first quarterly meeting of the year at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bankers confirmed that a global economic recovery was under way.

"We are in the recovery mode, that is something that is very much due to the emerging economies," Trichet said.

Those economies had "demonstrated resilience," and were "very, very clearly in a more dynamic mode now," the ECB chief told reporters.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

China Securities to Start Greater China Stock Index

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- China Securities Index Co. will start an index tracking Hong Kong, China and Taiwan stocks this month.

The Shanghai-based company will introduce the CSI Cross- Straits 500 Index on Jan. 18, according to a statement on its Web site. The measure will include companies on the CSI 300 Index, CSI Hong Kong 100 Index and 100 stocks from Taiwan, according to the statement.

“It’s useful as an observation benchmark but I don’t think it’ll be widely used at the beginning,” Phillip Chan, Hong Kong-based research director at Shenyin Wanguo HK Ltd., said by phone. “There is obviously a problem in trading the index given the heavy restrictions on both overseas and China investors.”

China limits overseas investments in its local-currency stocks to $30 billion under a so-called qualified foreign institutional investor program. Chinese investors can only buy overseas stocks through funds sold by approved domestic financial institutions.

China Securities Index, a joint venture between the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, introduced the CSI Hong Kong Index in May 2008 to track shares listed on the city’s bourse.

Source: Bloomberg

Tokyo Exchange Upgrades Trading System

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The Tokyo Stock Exchange introduced a faster trading system today, amid growing competition from dark pools and four years after a series of execution failures.

TSE’s new Arrowhead system slashes to five milliseconds the time needed to process orders, from two to three seconds previously. It will also enable the exchange to adapt quickly to smaller order volumes or sudden increases in the number of transactions, the bourse said on its Web site.

Proprietary trading systems, including so-called dark pools such as Liquidnet Inc., have been attracting asset managers with faster transactions and smaller price ticks. Liquidnet said it has almost doubled its Japanese clients to 111 institutional investors since it started local operations in June 2008.

Dark pools, which can make large anonymous trades, processed 1.2 percent of the nation’s stock transactions in 2008, according to market researcher Tabb Group LLC.

The upgrade may help restore the reputation of an exchange which last month was ordered to pay 10.7 billion yen ($115 million) in damages to Mizuho Securities Co. over its failure in December 2005 to cancel a faulty sell order. Six weeks earlier, system problems had shut down trading for more than four hours, while further glitches emerged during the following half year.

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