OREANDA-NEWS. On 27 April 2009 was announced, that on April 23, 2009 RTS launched trading on its new cash equity market – RTS Standard. Now the market participants have access to the cutting edge technologies of equity trading.

During the first trading day the market participants executed nearly 4 thousand trades for a total of 46.418 million US dollars. The first trade on RTS Standard was made by ALOR Plus Corporation and OLMA Investment Firm.

There were 19 brokerage companies participating in the first trading session on RTS Standard:

Deutsche Securities ZAO

Evrofinance Mosnarbank

Instroyinvest IMC

Metallinvestbank OJSCo SKB

OLMA Investment Firm

OTKRITIE Brokerage house JSC

JSC "Piter Trust Investment Company"

PROSPECT INVESTMENT CO

REGION BC LLC

Renaissance Broker

Solid

Troika Dialog

Universal Investment Company Partner Ltd.

Investment Company FINAM CJSC

Eltra IC

UBS Securities CJSC

Best sellers of the day were Sberbank ordinary shares. By the end of the main trading session the number of trades in this instrument reached 1,581 trades or 20.649 million US dollars in money terms.

Igor Stepanyan, Investment Company FINAM CJSC, Director General:

Our clients expressed their interest towards the new cash equity market as soon as RTS announced its plans to set up RTS Standard. This clearly demonstrates the market needs for the opportunities offered by RTS. Now we are completing the preparation of our infrastructure for trading on RTS Standard.

I believe there is a good chance for RTS Standard to become the leading market in terms of individual investor connections. The first trading day volumes have already confirmed our future outlook for RTS Standard, and the outlook is optimistic because the new market is tailored to the needs of brokers and allows them to benefit from the reduced funding costs.

Evgeny Dankevich, OTKRITIE Brokerage house JSC, Managing Director:

RTS and the market participants have done a lot of work within several months’ time. For a unique labour consuming project, RTS Standard demonstrated a high level of readiness on the first trading day: active members, presence of market-makers in the order books, good volumes, for a large part generated by clients.

At this point RTS Standard, a totally new cash equity market, is unfamiliar to the clients. However, they will definitely join the market as soon as they figure out the benefits.

Roman Goryunov, RTS, CEO:

We are very happy with the successful start of trading on RTS Standard, because right away the market participants engaged into active trading. Since this is a fundamentally new market for Russia, it requires a new approach towards the technologies of client servicing from brokers. The launch of RTS Standard was preceded by an effective joint preparation work of both RTS and the market participants. However, the market participants might need to take some more time to finalize the tuning process.

Today we realized that the new market came into being. We assume the final preparations will not take market participants longer than several weeks, after which we expect a significant number of individuals joining RTS Standard.

In the nearest future we are going to consider the possibility of using RTS Standard prices for the RTS Index calculation.

For further information on the new equity market RTS Standard please visit http://www.rts.ru/s1003.

RTS Standard sets a totally new standard for equity trading in Russia. It will facilitate building up the liquidity of the Russian securities market, curb counterparties’ risks and boost development of the infrastructure. It aims to attract solid foreign investor interest towards the local equity market due to the applied global standards of trading.

RTS Standard offers CCP trading in anonymous order book without full advance depositing of assets and with settlement on T+4. The market hours are from 10.30 am to 11.50 pm MSK. The range of instruments includes top 20 liquid stocks of Russian issuers. RTS Standard also offers portfolio margining with trades made on FORTS, RTS derivatives section, which makes trading in all the instruments possible using a single, consolidated cash position.