Doha : The Qatar Exchange, the Gulf country's equity market, must draft new listing rules before trading in bonds and Islamic debt can begin, according to Andre Went, the bourse's chief executive officer .
"We are drafting new rules for the bonds," Went told reporters at a seminar in the Qatari capital of Doha on Wednesday. The rules would relate to information disclosure and the size of the bonds by issuers, he said.
Went declined to say when bond or sukuk trading will start. In February, he said that bond trading may begin before the September introduction of the NYSE Euronext Universal Trading Platform, called UTP.
The Qatari government has sought to encourage the formation of a local debt market, offering 12 billion riyals (Dh12.09 billion) worth of bonds and sukuks to local banks earlier this year. Doha Bank, the country's third-biggest lender by revenue, would like to sell bonds by the end of the year in both dollars and riyals, chief executive officer Raghavan Seetharaman said in July.
Went became chief executive officer of Doha's 13-year-old bourse after NYSE Euronext acquired a 20 per cent stake in the exchange in June 2009 for $200 million (Dh734 million). The exchange plans eventually to introduce derivatives and exchange traded funds in addition to bonds and sukuks as part of an effort to modernise the bourse and increase trading, Went said in February.
New trading platform
The new UTP trading platform, which is scheduled to start September 5, will allow new order types and conditions including ‘market-to-limit' orders, ‘stop-loss orders' and ‘stop- limit orders', according to a brochure handed out at the seminar on Wednesday. The platform will also allow ‘fill-and- kill' orders, ‘fill-or-kill' and ‘minimum quantity' orders, according to the brochure.
The pre-trading ‘no cancel' period, when trades can't be terminated, will be cut from 15 minutes to five minutes under the new system, according to the brochure. ‘Core closing call', ‘no cancel period', and ‘trading at last' sessions will be added to the end of trading day before the market closes. The ‘continuous trading' period from 10 a.m. to 12:30 pm won't change.
The Qatar Exchange's market value has gained 17 per cent this year to $104 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The exchange's QE Index of 20 leading companies has gained 3 per cent in the same period.
The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Qatar's gross domestic product will increase this year by 19 per cent, faster than any other economy and double the country's growth rate for 2009.
