Launched in the beginning of 2010, the futures contract based on the Dow Jones American stock market index, has quickly attracted the interest of domestic investors, who were already connected to the pulse of foreign markets, given the correlation between the latter and the domestic markets.
Cristian Sima, the chairman of WBS Romania, the most active brokerage firm on the Sibiu Exchange in the month of April, considers that by autumn, turnover for the contracts based on the American index will amount to 200 million lei per day (meaning 20,000 contracts will be traded each day).
Last month, WBS Romania intermediated 48.613 futures contracts on Sibiu. Almost 40,000 of them were based on the Dow Jones index, with a volume of 440 million lei, Sima claims.
Mr. Sima is optimistic, expecting the domestic turnover of Dow Jones contracts to increase to a volume 10 times bigger than the joint turnover of the Sibiu and Bucharest exchanges together".