To effectively make technical preparations for the night trading, from the evening of June 7 to the afternoon of June 8, Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE) successfully carried out the first full-market networking test for night trading.
The call auction time of the night trading was 20:55-20:59; the bid matching time was 20:59-21:00; the continuous trading hours were 21:00-2:30 (next calendar days); the pause time of the continuous trading was 2:30-8:55. The products in the night trading test were limited to the RBD Palm Olein (p) and coke (j); the products of the day trading were all products.
The night trading test saw high-degree participation and active response on the market. The test results showed that 446 seats of 154 members and 10 information providers participated in the test, the trading volume of the whole session amounted to 1.35 million contracts (bilateral, the same below), and the volume of the night trading reached 610,000 contracts. The trading test enabled the workers of DCE and the member units and the clients to become more familiar with the overall program and the business processes of the night trading, creating conditions for the smooth introduction of the night trading.
A DCE official said that DCE officially launched the work related to the night trading in May 2012, and after comprehensive discussions and market research and survey as well as extensive solicitation of the opinions from futures company members, the preparatory work for the technical system of the night trading was officially launched in the second half of 2013. Currently, the work in the requirements, project approval, development and acceptance testing of the whole technical system has been completed, covering all the existent online systems of DCE. The emergency plans for the main production center, the local disaster recovery and the remote disaster recovery were deployed and exercised. The technical system has been in place.
In order to ensure the smooth introduction of the night trading, DCE carried out the full-market simulation trading for a period of one and a half months from March 18, covering all the DCE-listed futures products. As of April 11, the simulation test for the night trading has seen a total of 201 seats of 147 members connected to the test system, with the 15 DCE-listed futures products tested.
The DCE official said that the introduction of the night trading is one of the important ways to push forward the reform and opening up of Dalian futures market and a necessary measure to refine the futures products, better serve the industries and improve the international influence of the market. It is of great significance for the healthy and steady development of Dalian futures market. Under the new situation where currently the market has seen the pace of opening up accelerated and the international level constantly deepened, the introduction of the night trading, which will expand the times zones of the trading, will help give further play to the market functions of price discovery and hedging, improve the international influence of the market, and especially lay the foundation for the advantageous products of DCE to go global at an early date and for DCE to expand services on the international market in the future; at the same time, it can also ease the problems of the overnight risks for the positions of highly internationally-related products and the discontinuous prices.
The second full-market test will be carried out from the evening of June 14 to the afternoon of June 15, and DCE will complete the upgrading of the night trading technical system after the end of the second full-market test (June 15). The time of the official opening of the night trading will be notified separately.
Market participants believe that according to the listing process of the new products, it will not be long from the trading tests before the listing to the official introduction. After the completion of the two night trading tests, if everything goes well, the night trading will be introduced soon.
