Bursa Malaysia Berhad (Bursa Malaysia) will be implementing Direct Market Access (DMA) – a ‘ zero-touch electronic trading’ solution that enables real time execution of trade orders.
DMA effectively reduces the latency of trading order executions from the current system’s 5 seconds per transaction to a matter of milliseconds.
Bursa Malaysia Berhad’s Chief Executive Officer, Dato’ Yusli Mohamed Yusoff said DMA is essential for the Malaysian capital market to remain competitive in the global investment arena.
“DMA is already well-established in some of the world’s more developed markets like the United States, Europe and Australia. Globally, investor preferences are increasingly aligned to more efficient markets where trades are fully electronic and offer investors more control over their trade executions.”
He added, “DMA changes the trading landscape of the Malaysian capital market. With it investors will enjoy immediate execution of trade orders at a faster speed. By automating the trade order process, DMA provides investors greater control over trading execution and strategies.
“In addition, it also widens the spectrum of trading activities to include higher value added trading activities such as market-making, algorithmic and basket trading to take place,” he said.
DMA will be implemented in two phases. The first phase will involve the deployment of the Derivatives DMA which is targeted for completion towards the end of this year. The second phase will encompass equities and derivatives on a single DMA trading platform and will be implemented following the launch of the equities platform of Bursa Trade in early 2008.
DMA will be implemented on the back of Bursa Trade – the exchange’s highly scalable integrated trading system for derivatives and equities that is currently in its second phase of deployment.
The derivatives portion of Bursa Trade was implemented in November 2006, replacing the former derivatives trading platform (KATS) which had a technical capacity of ten transactions per second. Bursa Trade Derivatives has been tested to a capacity of more than one thousand transactions per second.
The equities portion of Bursa Trade is expected to be completed by early 2008.
