The Dubai Financial Market (DFM) and Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME) will jointly explore financial products opportunities following the signing of an agreement, which will cater to DFM’s large and diversified investor base of over 852,000 investors.
As the first initiative under this agreement, the two exchanges are planning to create a working group, following Dubai’s strategy to further develop financial markets.
The collaboration with DME will enable DFM to develop investments opportunities related to the GCC crude oil industry and offer retail investors the opportunity to be directly involved in the biggest and most relevant asset class in the region.
DFM plans to launch a new retail product derived from the Oman Crude Oil Futures, DME’s flagship contract that provides investors an opportunity to access this asset class.
Since its launch in 2007, DME has traded around 18 billion barrels of Oman crude oil and it is considered home for the most transparent sour crude benchmark in the Middle East and Asia.
The DME Oman marker price is used by National Oil Companies of Oman, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain to price more than 5.5 million barrels per day of Middle East crude oil.
The agreement was signed by Hamed Ali, CEO of DFM and Nasdaq Dubai, and Raid Al-Salami, Managing Director of DME, in the presence of Ahmad Sharaf, Chairman of DME, during the ‘Derivatives Day in Dubai’, the joint forum organized by the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) in partnership with DME and CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace.