Mumbai: India’s new stock exchange MCX-SX started trading in equities on Monday competing against the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
MCX-SX has become the third national equity market trading platform. Although the volume on the first day of the trade was thin, the exchange promoted by Jignesh Shah, who is also the promoter of Multi-Commodity Exchange and Financial Technologies (India) Ltd, is expected to gradually gain market share and give competition to the largest stock exchange NSE.
The total value of the shares traded at the MCX-SX on the first day of trading was Rs.6.9 million. Reliance Industries was the most actively traded scrip both in terms of value and by volume.
MCX-SX started trading in the shares of 1,116 listed companies. There are 5,191 firms listed on the BSE, India’s oldest stock exchange, while 1,665 companies are listed on the National Stock Exchange that started trading in 1994 and has now emerged as the largest stock exchange in the country.
In line with the BSE Sensex and NSE Nifty, the MCX-SX has introduced a benchmark index called SX-40.
SX-40 is a free-float based index of 40 large-cap and liquid stocks, representing diverse sectors of the economy. The base value of SX-40 is 10,000 and with its base date being March 31, 2010.
The index is designed to measure the economic performance with better representation of various industries and sectors based on ICB, a leading global classification from Britain’s FTSE.