The Philippine Stock Exchange is considering to embrace within this year a trading regime where stockbrokers can trade anonymously, ahead of the originally targeted March 2015 rollout.
Broker anonymity refers to the practice of not showing the broker identifiers involved in trades at the PSE trading engine, similar to the regime in stock markets in the United States, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.
By adopting this policy, the PSE aims to attract more investors and improve liquidity.
The PSE said some studies have shown that broker anonymity had positive effects on the market primarily by reducing bid-ask spreads.
“Since we announced our plan to move to a broker anonymous environment, we have been receiving positive feedback from market participants who see the move as a way to attract more investors to trade in our market. Implementing this program this year instead of next year will allow us to experience the upside from this change much earlier,” PSE president Hans Sicat said.
Together with the move to advance the rollout of the broker anonymity regime, the PSE will drop the earlier announced phased implementation of the program. Initially, the PSE was targeting the implementation of Phase 1 of broker anonymity in March 2014, which involves limiting the visibility of broker IDs of matched trades only to brokers and their systems. By removing Phase 1, broker anonymity, once implemented, will make all broker identifiers anonymous to all market participants.
“Even as we are now planning to have broker anonymity implemented this year, we have to evaluate the readiness of the market and various systems for full broker anonymity under the reduced time frame to prepare for this change. We hope to finalize our study over the next weeks and make announcements on the final schedule shortly after that,” Sicat said.
“We would like to assure the investing public that, much like in other markets abroad that have stopped displaying broker IDs for matched trades, surveillance operations will not be affected as regulators will continue to have access to information on broker IDs,” Sicat said. Doris C. Dumlao