Lunch breaks on several Asia-Pacific exchanges are gettingshorter or going away altogether, resulting in a longer overalltrading day in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Will this be enough, however, to stimulate the volume growthseen in other parts of the world? For example, in the US,competition between trading venues has ushered in a lowlatency infrastructure, lower trading fees and a variety ofunique order types and functionality. The same has happenedin Europe following the introduction of MiFID and is in theprocess of taking place in Canada. While market structure ineach of these regions is not perfect, it has been successful inattracting a wide range of participants, which in turn haveadded volume and liquidity and reduced spreads. In ouropinion, the Asia-Pacific markets will need to do more thansimply increase the length of their trading days to attractliquidity to the region.
Click here to download the most recent piece from Instinet's Global Trading Research group. In this one, Alison Crosthwait examines the recent market hours changes in Asia-Pacific and discusses whether they alone will be sufficient to increase trading velocity in the region.
