On March 31, the options on soybean meal futures (“soybean meal options” for short), the first commodity options product in China, were listed and traded on Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE). On the trading day, the trading volume of the soybean meal options reached 23,000 contracts (unilateral, the same below) with the turnover at RMB22.863 million and the open interest at 16,000 contracts. Specifically, the trading volume and open interests of the call options and the put options were basically the same with the trading volume of the options reaching 4.7% of that of the underlying futures. The market participants generally believed that on the first trading day the soybean meal options performed rationally with moderate liquidity and stable operation on the whole, meeting the market expectation.
On the first trading day, a total of 142 contracts for 7 contract months were launched. On the day, the dominant soybean meal futures contract was M1709 and the dominant options series is the M1709 series, with the trading volume of the series at 12,000 contracts, accounting for 47.2% of the total for the soybean meal options on the day, followed by the M1707 and M1801 series, taking up 15.8% and 13.7% of the total respectively.
With regard to the number of the participating investors, with high eligibility requirements for investors, the number of the clients participating in the options trading on the day was 420, including 130 institutional clients, whose trading volume accounted for 71.5% of the total.
