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Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange Launches
May 5, 2016 7:26 AM
By Rapaport News
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RAPAPORT... Trading has started on the Singapore Diamond Investment
Exchange (SDiX), the world’s “first” commodity exchange for physically-settled
diamonds.
The introduction on May 5 “represents the most significant change in
global diamond trading practices in hundreds of years,” according to SDiX,
which is backed by investors including the Singapore government’s sovereign
wealth fund Temasek Holdings.
“The SDiX represents a tectonic shift in how diamonds are
traded,” said Alain Vandenborre, the platform's executive chairman and founder. “By
providing the first-ever transparent and open price discovery mechanism for
diamonds, the exchange unlocks a major opportunity for investors to trade diamonds
as an asset class.”
In addition to Temasek, SDiX is backed by Vertex Venture
Holdings, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek, and big-name businessmen such
as veteran investor Jim Rogers and Sun Tongyu, one of the founders of Alibaba.
The old-fashioned method of trading diamonds in physical
bourses gives buyers no transparency on the trading process and access to
pricing information, and only offers limited ability to investors who would
like to participate in the market, SDiX claimed.
The exchange is built on an “ecosystem” that includes an electronic
trading platform, a depository for the physical settlement of diamonds and a
global network of service providers to support it, such as the Gemological
Institute of America. Standard Chartered Bank will provide banking services and
facilitate the cash settlement of transactions, SDiX said.
The new bourse launches with broker members across
Singapore, Hong Kong, London and Dubai. Trading hours are between 2.30 p.m. and 6.30
p.m. Singapore time to allow global traders to participate.
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Tags:
exchanges, investment diamonds, Rapaport News, Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange, Temasek Holdings, trading
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