Singapore Mercantile Exchange to launch cash-settled gold, silver, copper futures contracts

This will be in contract sizes of 100 troy ounces for gold, 5,000 troy ounces for silver and 5 metric tons for copper.

According to SMX, the contracts are for unique trading and investment opportunities for Asian market participants and other participants across different time zones.

These US Dollar-denominated contracts will start trading at 1000 am SGT and be traded across the Asian, European and American time zones. The contracts will be cleared through the Singapore Mercantile Exchange Clearing Corporation (SMXCC) and settled against benchmark international futures prices on expiry.

Thomas McMahon, Chief Executive Officer of SMX, said: “The contracts to go live will open doors for easier access to these markets for effective portfolio diversification, position trading and hedging by Asian market participants. We are also confident of gaining the attention of arbitragers, algorithmic and high frequency traders to use our low latency, robust and scalable trading platform.” The Exchange has an EFP mechanism to assist physical market users and investors to exchange physical delivery in these cash settled contracts.

SMX already offers WTI crude, Euro-priced Brent crude and Euro-US Dollar futures along with a physical Gold contract deliverable in Singapore since commencement of trading on August 31, 2010. The Exchange has a wide and diversified network of members and empanelled Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) for customers to access its platform along with its own proprietary front-end solution for direct market access.