Euronext has announced client trading fee reductions for transactions in Dutch individual equity and index options.
The reductions are part of the Amsterdam exchange’s strategic review for this retail market.
Fees for all retail investor transactions will be reduced from €0.40 cents to €0.31 cents as of October 1, a reduction of almost 25%. As of November 1, the fee for market orders (orders at the best available price) will be further reduced to €0.20 cents, a 50% reduction compared with the current fee, Euronext said.
“By lowering fees for our individual equity and index options, our aim is to respond to retail clients’ needs and promote trading on the central market,” said Adam Rose, head of financial derivatives at Euronext.
“Our financial derivatives franchise is strong, but underexploited. We hope that this action will further drive growth and liquidity in our Dutch options market, which is very popular amongst retail investors,” he said.
Euronext Amsterdam offers a range of structured products, of which the majority are leverage products such as turbos, sprinters and speeders. Pure index trackers, plain vanilla warrants, bonus certificates, yield enhancement certificates and capital-protected products are also available on the exchange, “[…] on an open, fully transparent, liquid, competitive and diversified market with a variety of trading parties and a broad diversity of flow,” Rose added.
To date, 14,182 new leverage products from ABN Amro, Citi, Commerzbank, ING and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have been listed on Euronext Amsterdam in 2014.
Changes
The market for leverage products in the Netherlands has seen a number of major changes in 2014.
In June, ABN Amro announced that it will stop selling equity derivatives and its own structured products, including its range of leverage turbo certificates.
Increased regulations, changing customer needs and the high cost of technology led the state-owned bank to review the activities of its markets division – part of the bank’s merchant banking business – which sells structured products to clients worldwide.
BinckBank entered the turbo certificates market in July. The online broker’s turbos are not available via Euronext, but instead BinckBank uses Citigroup Automated Trading System (Cats), a trading platform which is owned by Börse Stuttgart and Citibank, for trading.
Earlier this month, BinckBank was backed by the Hague District Court for its use of the term “turbo” in its leverage certificates range. The ruling followed a claim by BNP Paribas, which took over the market making activities for RBS investment products in September, to prevent BinckBank from using what it considered a trademark in future.