The Mexican Exchange (BMV Group), the second-largest exchange in Latin America, has implemented a number of strategic initiatives designed to promote foreign investment in the Mexican financial markets.
The exchange now provides worldwide participants with seamless, high-speed access through low-touch direct market access (DMA), high speed co-location services and FIX standard protocol for order routing and market data.
By successfully improving upon our operative rules to better comply with international market standards, BMV is now better equipped to provide global investors with more efficient trading and connectivity to Mexico, says Luis Tllez, president and CEO of BMV Group. Global market participants can access The Mexican Exchange, as well as benefit from trading our products, in a more seamless and efficient manner than ever before.
Foreign securities traded on the exchange represent 18% of total trading volume, The Mexican Exchange says. In addition, the number of listed securities in the segment reached 750, including 339 individual stocks from around the world and a diversified group of 411 ETFs. Latin American securities (representing 13% of the volume traded in the global market) hit $5 billion in volume in 2011 year-to-date with 29 stocks and ten ETFs from Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru.
Earlier this year, The Mexican Derivatives Exchange (MexDer), part of the BMV Group, established phase one of an alliance with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a south-to-north strategic order routing agreement, giving Mexican investors access to CME Groups benchmark derivatives contracts, including interest rates, foreign currencies, equity indexes, energy, metals and agricultural commodities.
Phase two of the partnership, north-to-south, has been in place since the summer and provides CME Group customers with access to MexDer benchmark products, including Mexican Stock Exchange Index futures, bond futures and Mexican peso/US dollar futures contracts.
In 2012 The Mexican Exchange will announce the launch of a new internally developed trading engine. The multi-market, multi-asset, scalable trading engine has throughput of more than 200,000 messages per second. The exchange says the new engine will be ultra-low latency, executing trades in 100 microseconds roundtrip, an improvement of 25 milliseconds over the legacy system. Full deployment of the new system is planned for the second quarter of 2012.
Also next year, The Mexican Exchange will introduce several new initiatives including midpoint hidden order book trading, which is beneficial for institutional investors looking to trade large blocks anonymously with reduced execution risk. Simpler cross order rules also will be implemented.
(CG)