Moves to enhance electronic trading on the London Metal Exchange are not a back-door attempt to close the ring, Europe's last open outcry trading floor, the exchange's chief executive officer said.
Matthew Chamberlain said the introduction of Trade At Settlement (TAS) functionality last month and a three-month trial starting next week to calculate nickel prices using a weighted average price (VWAP) method on the exchange's electronic trading platform had arisen as a result of its 2017 strategy discussion paper. "There is no hidden agenda to shut the ring. If there were, I like to think we would have been much smarter about it, and not made numerous reforms to the ring over the past few years, because then we could have said,' oh look, there is a problem with the ring,'" he told Fastmarkets in an interview."We have put so much effort into the evolution of the ring over the past several years that we make it much harder to come to that outcome, because the ring has done so much to advance itself as a pricing venue. The ring comes...