The Colombo stock market will before end 2011 see gold traded through Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), which are securities that track an index, a commodity or a basket of assets and trading similar to a stock on an exchange, according to officials.
“The ETF regulations are now completed and this will be gazetted by next month. The investors will be able to trade in certain securities such as gold certificates,” Malik Cader, Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) told the Business Times.
He added that already many are interested in ETF and that some parties are in discussion with SEC to bring in these products and some of them will enter the market by the end of the year.
He said that an ETF will attract institutional investors into the Colombo market. He also added that ETFs are attractive to most as it will assist traders to balance their portfolios.
The regulator has received some eight applications for the Commodities Exchange’s expressions of interest (EOI) which the regulator had called in early April. “They are some of the best and the biggest in the region,” he added.
Mr. Cader said that the World Bank team here to assist the SEC to amend the SEC Act and also demutualization of the Colombo Stock Exchange has made much progress since mid last month. He added that many amendments were discussed as well and the team met with all the stakeholders.
He also said a high-level legal and technical delegation would visit the Securities and Exchange Board of India in a bid to understand and study the central counter-party system in India. |
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