The Thailand Futures Exchange PCL (TFEX), under The Stock Exchange of Thailand group, reveals that the average daily trading volume of its stock futures has tripled since last year to 33,175 contracts. As the market continues its bullish sentiment, investors saw the opportunity to boost returns using single stock futures. Open interest has also increased to 385,424 contracts.
“Stock futures has attracted a lot of investors since the beginning of this year. The average daily trading volume between January 1 and February 20 surged 275 percent from 2012, when it traded an average of only 8,849 contracts per day. Investor are quickly starting to see the benefit of using stock futures to manage their portfolio especially in this bullish market as it can give them more returns while using substantially less cost than trading stocks directly. Stock futures requires investors to only deposit initial margins of only 4 - 13 percent of contract value,” said TFEX Managing Director Kesara Manchusree.
Investors can trade stock futures using both auto-matching and block trade. And recently on January 14, TFEX has changed the position limit from a single level of 20,000 contracts to a multi-level of 20,000 – 435,500 contracts. Each stock futures now have its own position limit that is proportion to its number of listed shares.
Currently, there are 30 underlying stocks trading on TFEX, which are ADVANC, BANPU, BAY, BBL, BTS, CPALL, CPF, DTAC, HMPRO, IRPC, ITD, IVL, KBANK, KTB, LH, MINT, PS, PTT, PTTEP, QH, SCB, SCC, STA, TCAP, THAI, TMB, TOP, TRUE, TTA, and TUF. The top five most popular stock futures are BTS (22.49 percent), ITD (14.22 percent), TMB (12.87 percent), KTB (12.11 percent), and QH (11.71 percent), respectively, totaling 72.39 percent of all stock futures trading.
In addition, TFEX plans to expand the underlying stocks to cover constituents of the SET100 Index which have a market capitalization of more than THB 10 billion and expects to launch the additional underlying stocks in March, Kesara said.