"We are offering Dutch market participants the desired alternative and opening up new trading opportunities worldwide for Xetra participants," said Rainer Riess, Head of Stock Market Business Development at Deutsche Börse, at a press briefing in Amsterdam on Tuesday. The goal is to provide a high-performance, reliable and cost-effective electronic platform for trading and clearing in Dutch equities, he said. Investors profit from a larger investment universe on Xetra with higher liquidity, and new business opportunities open up for the intermediaries, Riess added.
With this new initiative, the Deutsche Börse Group is further developing its European Stars concept. Up to now, all of the Dutch and French equities as well as the Belgian and Finnish equities in the Dow Jones Euro STOXX 50 index have been tradable on Xetra with guaranteed liquidity and at the same costs as a German equity. With the inclusion of all equities in the Dutch AEX index, it will be possible to trade a complete non-German blue-chip index continuously on Xetra for the first time. Market Experts will quote binding bid and ask prices for all 25 securities and thus provide for high liquidity. Eurex, the world's largest derivatives market, has been trading options on all of the equities in the AEX 25 index since June 2002, and has increased its market share in Dutch options to more than 15 percent.
Clearstream is reducing the fees for the clearing of all AEX 25 securities. This will bring the clearing costs for the Dutch equities down to the same level as that of a domestic German transaction. As an added incentive, Deutsche Börse will refund to the Market Experts and most active participants 70 percent of the net trading fees in excess of 50,000 euros a month for the whole Dutch segment for two years. Morever, Deutsche Börse is supporting new customers with the technical connection to Xetra by bearing the costs for the trading hardware.
