The Australia Stock Exchange (ASX) revealed that total capital raised was $8.1 billion in September 2018, up 1 percent from September 2017, the previous corresponding period (pcp).
The statistic was released as part of the ASX Group’s Monthly Activity Report for this month.
The market report found average daily futures and options on futures volumes were up 4 percent on the pcp.
Average daily futures volume was also up 4 percent, but average daily options volume was down 18 percent on the pcp.
The notional value of over-the-counter interest rate derivative contracts centrally cleared was $305 billion, compared to $486 billion in the pcp.
However, single stock options average daily contracts traded in September were down 13 percent and index options average daily contracts traded were down 3 percent on the pcp.
The value of securities held in Austraclear was 5 percent higher than the pcp.
Concerning settlements, the value of securities held in Clearing House Electronic Sub-register System (CHESS) was 14 percent higher than the pcp.
ASX plans to replace CHESS with a distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution as the post-trade infrastructure for Australia’s equity market.
The new system is estimated to go-live between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021.
At ASX’s annual general meeting on 4 October, Rick Holliday-Smith, the chairman of ASX, said: “2018 was another strong year for ASX. The result reflects our balanced approach of investing in the integrity of our core activities and pursuing growth initiatives.”
He added: “We don’t measure our performance by the financial numbers alone. We also have important activities underway to strengthen our capabilities to the standards that shareholders and the regulators expect.”
“This is an ongoing journey and we have more work to do before we achieve a state that will be acceptable to us. Over the past 12 months, ASX continued to embrace new technology to strengthen our foundations; we developed new products and services for our customers; and we further evolved our rules to keep the standards of our market high.”
Dominic Stevens, CEO of ASX, commented: “This past year has been a solid one for ASX, not just financially but also in building a more resilient ASX and in beginning to see exciting opportunities opening up in the coming years.”
He concluded: “The last two years have been extremely busy and productive for ASX. We are investing to realise new opportunities and to support the quality of our existing business. There is much to do to complete our stronger foundations and technology replacement programmes.”
“However, we see this hard work as setting up ASX to benefit from the underlying growth in our industry, as well as take advantage of attractive growth opportunities we see unfolding in the 2020s.”
