SINGAPORE (June 28): Macquarie Bank has issued call and put warrants on the Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), the US stock market index that tracks the largest 500 companies listed on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. Trading on the SGX for the warrants started on Monday.

This complements the bank’s existing suite of warrants on foreign indices, such as the SGX Nikkei225, the FTSE China A50 and the Hang Seng Index.

The warrants will track the movement in the relevant futures on the S&P 500 index. The index trades 23 hours a day, including the full trading hours of the Singapore market. This allows local investors the ability to trade the moves in the US markets in local Singapore time.

“We’re anticipating the S&P500 warrants to be very popular with Singapore investors. Currently index warrants account for more than 80% of the Singapore warrant market turnover, as investors are attracted to the ability to access foreign indices,” says Barnaby Matthews, Head of Derivatives for Macquarie in SEA.

Chan Kum Kong, Head of Research and Products, SGX concurs with the assessment, pointing out that the “structured warrants market has been growing steadily with traded value doubling in the last quarter”.