NASDAQ Dubai issues its monthly trading report for October 2009

This brought the total number of equity derivatives traded on the Exchange to 90,467 since NASDAQ Dubai launched the market in November 2008, with 52 per cent of the trades taking place in the last three months.

The Exchange's equity derivatives market consists of futures listed on 21 individual UAE companies and on the FTSE NASDAQ Dubai UAE 20 share index. These have been designed as hedging and investment mechanisms for GCC and international investors. The index rose 76 per cent from end-2008 to end-October 2009, to 2,201.

Equities trading volumes on NASDAQ Dubai rose to 2.53 billion shares in the first 10 months of 2009, up 32 per cent from 1.92 billion reported in the same period of 2008. In the month of October 2009, 213 million equities traded, a fall of 39 per cent from the 350 million reported in October 2008 and 19 per cent down from 262 million in September 2009.
The Exchange introduced mandatory reporting of all over the counter equities trades in September 2008.

A total of 1,273 Dubai Gold Securities (DGS) traded on the exchange in October 2009, compared to 11,249 in September 2009. Since listing in March 2009, a total of 40,213 DGS traded on the exchange up to the end of October.