Tokyo Commodity Exchange, Inc. (“TOCOM”) today announced that the Exchange has just launched “Chukyo-Oil Market” , and commenced trading at 9:00 JST.
By launching the Chukyo Oil Market, TOCOM intends to offer a forum where trading participants of the oil market operated by Central Japan Commodity Exchange (C-COM), which is in the process of liquidating the positions in their markets toward the end of January 2011, can continue to trade. At the new market, gasoline and kerosene are the listed commodities and their contract specifications are identical to the current C-COM products. The trading method and trading hour are adopted from those used at other TOCOM markets (individual auction by electronic trading --multiple executions, continuous trading, and the extended trading hours from9:00 to 15:30 and from 17:00 to 4:00 JST). 39 trading participants have acquired membership to this new market and started trading today.
At the opening of the trade this morning, Tadashi Ezaki, President & CEO of TOCOM commented as follows. “I am pleased to announce the launch of Chukyo-Oil Market today. What worked as the driving force behind our efforts were enthusiasm of the oil industry of the Nagoya region to seek for the market where they can continue to use for procurement after C-COM ceased to operate, as well as our sense of mission as a publicly-run commodity exchange to keep the market stay functioning as a public unility. Now that we offer two oil markets at TOCOM, we hope to serve wider trading needs of the oil industry, and expect some synergistic effect to generate and boost entire oil futures market. At the same time, we will work to promote Chukyo-Oil Market to the retail investors, who may find its smaller trading-lot attractive.
I would like to thank all the concerned parties who contributed to the opening of Chukyo-Oil Market today. And I would appreciate the continued support for successful development of the market."
