AmCham's ICT and Investment & Capital Market committees held
a joint meeting on April 12 with guest speakers Maher Asham,
managing director of Egypt for Information Dissemination (EGID),
Tarek E. Abdel-Bary, managing director of Misr for Central Clearing
Depository & Registry, and Mohamed Sultan, chief product officer
of LINKdotNET, to discuss "IT developments in the Cairo & Alexandria
Stock Exchanges and the money market: paving the way to online
trading."
Abdel-Bary defined online trading as the ability to place, execute
and manage investors' orders, transactions and information directly
in the market using a single system, which should manage portfolios,
online payment to/from brokers, give online price feed and market
news, and be able to trade in different markets and financial
instruments. In Egypt, online trading is expected to increase
liquidity, transparency, daily market volume, investor protection
and foreign investments. At the same time, it would reduce human
errors and trading costs, eliminate investor-broker trading
problems and solve cash problems during public tenders. Abdel-Bary
also showed the online trading workflow and the system components
required for an efficient mechanism.
Asham gave an overview
on why the stock exchange's activities should go electronic.
He said the efficiency of online trading is affected by IT infrastructure.
With an average of 1 billion transactions per day and new models
being introduced in the market, enormous IT infrastructure lies
ahead of any company that plans to trade online, including continuous
software development, full hardware replacement and a disaster
recovery site. As for long-term plans, new joint ventures have
to be introduced where the trading cycle between key players
operates smoothly. Finally, Sultan explained that remote, online
trading decisions are based upon fully transparent, live online
data, such as stock quotes and company/industry news. Breaking
news is communicated to all clients at the same time, trade
placement is managed by the client himself and the response
is nearly instantaneous. Sultan then demonstrated the online
trading technical setup, explaining its usage steps.
