Today Liffe announced the introduction of options on the shares of the Dutch companies Wavin, AMG and Arcadis on the Amsterdam market. The options on Wavin N.V. will be introduced on 31 October. The first day of trading of the AMG N.V. options will be 20 November and the launch date for the Arcadis N.V. options is 27 November. These new American style options (ticker symbols: WAV, AMG and ARC) will expire on the third Friday of the contract month and will have initial lifetimes ranging from 3 to 9 months. Each option will represent 100 shares in the relevant equity fund and will be cleared via LCH.Clearnet. Liquidity in the options will be supported by primary market makers (PMMs) and competitive market makers (CMMs), and trading will take place on LIFFE CONNECT®.
The market for these new options will be supported by the highly successful ‘full screen’ central market model used in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and originally pioneered in Amsterdam. This model gives investors access to competitive prices throughout the trading day by ensuring a constant display of bid and offer prices, thus improving on-screen liquidity, enhancing the quality of the market and providing added value for customers.
From January to August 2008 Liffe has traded 708,016,707 futures and options contracts up 13% on the same period in 2007. The Amsterdam derivatives market has traded 90,835,476 in the year-to-date. In March Liffe launched a unique product for the European market; daily options on the AEX index®. Daily options are designed for investors who want to trade the day-to-day movements caused by news. Since the launch of the AEX index®. Daily options over 1,6 million contracts have already been traded.
