Electronic Trading Makes Frontier Markets More Attractive

The global frontier markets are mature enough to give the emerging markets a run for their money, according to Aite Group’s Danielle Tierney and Gabriel Wang.

The industry analyst firm recently published a research note, Frontier Markets: Emerging World: Exploring the New Frontier,  in which the authors examine the macroeconomic and fundamentals of 65 frontier markets and found reasonable valuations, low volatility and low correlation between developed and emerging markets.

Usually I am not interested in the straight economic research, but the authors tossed in chart showing that roughly a third of the frontier markets had deployed Nasdaq OMX’s X-stream multi-asset trading platform since 2008.

I’m sure other exchange technology providers like Deutsche Bourse, London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange had similar wins over the same period, but since I’m not paid for writing this blog let us just take it as a given.

That is about time I started to notice that a rash of press release announcing the various contact wins. It came after assigning one of my favorite stories about the Iraq Stock Exchange’s paper-based trading and had a T+30 settlement cycle (circa 2006) and the post-Regulation NMS exchange consolidation.

As these markets continue to invest in electronic trading, the more efficient they should become.

However, I doubt that it will become much easier for foreign investors to trade directly in the markets due to the standard local market regulations and currency control issues.