New Revamped STI Causing Unhappiness Among Investors

Singapore Exchange (SGX) just launched the much anticipated new revamped STI last week on 10 Jan 2008. It has caused some unhappiness among investors. SGX needs to do better than that.

TodayOnline has an article on this unhappiness.

Read on below as extracted directly from TodayOnline:

The three organisations behind the revamped Straits Times Index (STI) are believed to be reviewing a decision on whether to impose additional charges for its use.

This comes after mounting unhappiness was expressed by brokerages, resulting in remisiers and investors trading without live STI values.

Today understands that the three organisations — London-based FTSE Group, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Singapore Press Holdings — will now evaluate whether or not to implement the charges after at least a year.

With brokerages unwilling to input the data feed for 19 new indices into their servers, traders could not access the index values on their screens. This situation continued on Friday, much to the frustration of the traders, who need real time STI values to position their trades.

"This is causing a lot of distress to remisiers, and I hope they can give us some leeway until the problem is sorted out," said a dealer at a local brokerage firm, who requested anonymity.

Retail investors have had to access other websites for STI values, needed for an indication of market sentiment, instead of seeing them directly from their trading platforms, said another remisier.

Small investors champion David Gerald said that the "current unhappy situation" over the additional charges for the data feed does not help Singapore's reputation as a financial centre.

"I hope an amicable resolution can be found as soon as possible," said Mr Gerald, who is president of Securities Investors Association of Singapore.

FTSE Asia-Pacific managing director Paul Hoff said the SGX is evaluating the situation with the brokerages.