The Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) has gone live with NEXT – futures derivatives trading in a move to enhance risk management and becoming the second exchange in Africa to offer exchange-traded derivatives.

The NSE will offer two types of derivatives; equity single stock futures (SSF) starting with shares of five listed firms that met specific criteria such as high daily trading volumes (British American Tobacco, East Africa Breweries, Equity Group Holdings, Kenya Commercial Bank Group, and Safaricom Plc) as well as an NSE 25 Share Index futures (EIF) that provides investors with a benchmark to track the performance of the Kenyan securities market. The introduction of NEXT futures will also increase trading activity and liquidity at the NSE as investors will have the potential for greater returns, even when share prices are going down (short selling), as they only have to put up a small amount of money as leverage.

This comes after a successful six-month pilot test in which end-to-end derivative transactions were done in a live environment, and which tested the capabilities of market players. Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority (CMA) then granted approval in May 2019 for the NSE to launch and operate the derivatives exchange market.

The CMA has also licensed several entities to undertake derivative services.  The stockbrokers that will offer derivatives futures to investors from today will be African Alliance Securities, AIB Capital, Apex Africa Capital, CBA Capital, Dyer & Blair Investment Bank, Faida Investment Bank, Genghis Capital, Kestrel Capital,  Kingdom Securities, NIC Securities, SBG Securities, Standard Investment Bank and Sterling Capital. Also, two banks, Stanbic and Cooperative, will provide clearing and settlement services, collecting margins and generating data and reports on futures trading activities.

The launch of NEXT derivatives trading comes after a series of other innovations at the NSE including the introductions of the M-Akiba mobile phone bond, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT’s), asset-backed securities and exchange traded funds (ETF’s). If the uptake and performance of stock futures are successful, next at the NSE will be currency derivatives and interest rate derivatives.

EDIT November 2019: The Capital Market Soundness Report- Q3. 2019 from the CMA showed that 349 contracts were traded between 4th July 2019 and 30th September 2019.

Of these, the market traded 248 Safaricom contracts representing a turnover of KES 6.9 million; banking contracts came in second with 58 KCB Group contracts traded at a total turnover of KES 2.3 million; and 26 Equity Bank contracts traded at KES 1.0 million. The NSE 25-Share index contract traded 12 contracts at a total turnover of 2.6M.