The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has entered into a content sharing agreement with the United States Options Industry Council (OIC), the premier body in the US created to educate investors and financial advisers about the benefits and risks of exchange-traded equity options.
The agreement makes the OIC's world-class research available to a local audience. ASX will provide OIC institutional equity options white papers on the ASX website alongside its own Australian-focused research material. The information can be found at: asx.com.au/instooptions.
The benefits of the content sharing agreement are already evident, with ASX replicating the OIC's quant study on the collar strategy over the NASDAQ 100 index for an examination of the same trading strategy over the S&P/ASX 200 index using XJO options.
Coinciding with the agreement, ASX is hosting the OIC's Managing Director, Phil Gocke, in Australia in February 2012. Internationally renowned, Mr Gocke will deliver a series of seminars for institutional investors in Melbourne and Sydney, showcasing recent OIC institutional research and providing an overview of the US market and trends in new product development.
The agreement with OIC is the latest in a series of enhancements ASX has made to the equity options market to improve the market's accessibility to investors and stimulate liquidity. Other actions include:
- reducing the contract size from 1,000 to 100 shares per contract; and
- increasing the quoting requirements for market makers to generate greater price discovery for customers.
For the July to October 2011 period, ASX equity options volumes have risen:
- single stock equity options volume is up 4.1%, with an average daily volume of 651,054 contracts compared to 625,209 in 2010-11; and
- XJO index options (over the S&P/ASX 200) volume is up 96.9%, with an average daily volume of 52,895 contracts compared to 26,860 in 2010-2011.