NOS Clearing, the world's leading clearing house for freight derivatives, is opening an office in Singapore and is extending clearing to include more of Asian time zone trading hours.
NOS Clearing, the world's leading clearing house for freight derivatives, is opening an office in Singapore and is extending clearing to include more of Asian time zone trading hours.

Across Asia, the market for freight futures and options is growing at a record pace, according to NOS Clearing chief executive Morten Erichsen. In Asia, the fastest growing sector of both the dry bulk and tanker freight market is for cleared contracts.

This growth is driven by a need for existing principals to be able to trade with many of the new players entering the market in Asia. With freight derivatives clearing from NOS, a freight trader may trade anonymously with guaranteed settlement. Erichsen says that joining NOS, gives access to the liquidity of its nearly 180 members, enabling more liquidity in both dry bulk and tanker derivatives across Asia.

'To support the massive growth in Asian freight trading, we believe that our investments in market infrastructure such as Asian time zone clearing will really help our members,' he says.

NOS, which has close to 100,000 lots of open interest in freight alone, is now able to provide clearing from Oslo and customer services to principals in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong China, Taiwan and Australia from its new office.

Opening hours have been extended and straight-through clearing is available from 13:00 Singapore time during Central European Summer Time and 14:00 Singapore time during the rest of the year (06:00 CET). The Singapore office will be open from 09:30 local time for customer support.

'As the largest clearer in the freight market, we believe that being able to clear during Asian time zones from our central clearing systems in Europe, we will become a very attractive proposition to most of the existing and many of the new freight players in Asia,' Erichsen says.