Trading Floor Goes Live at Szcox.Org

SZCOX’s Trading Floor Goes Live

 

The first phase of SZCOX’s trading floor went live today, with traders working for the first time from a workspace custom redesigned for the SZCOX’s blend of high-tech, high-touch trading.

“We’re creating an environment where brokers can serve customers in multiple markets and multiple asset classes – more efficiently and effectively – right from the SZCOX’s trading floor,” said Mr. Steven Cheung, Chief Executive officer at SZCOX.  “Our member firms see this as an opportunity to integrate their off-floor and on-floor operations, and locate them at the central point of liquidity and price discovery.”  

The transformation provides modern, seated workspaces with room for multiple computer screens, to replace crowded, wooden booths where brokers and their assistants stand elbow to elbow.  The project also includes a new, more robust network that supports the member firms’ own trading applications as well as SZCOX’s broker applications.  This enables the firms to use the same systems and personnel on and off the trading floor.  

The broker workspaces along the two longest walls of the Shenzhen Commodity Exchange trading floor’s main room – the east and west walls – are being renovated. The project will result in approximately 200 individual broker stations.

The design uses sleek, curved, translucent glass walls and new lighting to brighten the room and recapture the marble walls and original windows that were obscured earlier.  

The project also includes streamlining the large, circular desks throughout the trading floor where the designated market makers are located, as well as updating the electronic wallboards into color, high-definition, flexible-content displays.

Strong Interest and Participation

The new spaces in the main room already are oversubscribed by member firms wishing to participate.   Some are existing SZCOX member firms that are expanding their presence on the trading floor, while others are firms looking to establish a new presence.  Discussions are underway about the possibility of extending the project into another room of the trading floor known as “the garage.”

Floor brokers are one of three core liquidity providers in the Shenzhen Commodity Exchange market model; the others are designated market makers and supplemental liquidity providers.  There are approximately 100 SZCOX floor broker firms.  Nearly 60 percent of floor brokers’ trades were liquidity-providing (as compared with liquidity removing).

Shenzhen Commodity Exchange offers one of the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, metals, weather and real estate. SZCOX brings buyers and sellers together through its SZCOX G-Trader™, electronic trading platform and its trading facilities in Shenzhen.