KARACHI, April 23: The Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) will start options and index trading by the end of current calendar year.

KSE managing director Moeen M Fudda stated this while addressing a press conference here on Wednesday. He said that KSE management has set up a technical committee consisting of stock brokers for launching this project.

He said the introduction of options and index trading was an integral part of the ongoing reforms in corporate sector of the country.

Talking about the conversion of badla financing into margin financing, he said that four major banks HBL, NBP, PICIC Commercial Bank and MCB will launch various products for margin financing.

Fudda pointed out that the performance of KSE was better than other stock exchanges of the region between April 2002 to April 2003, showing a surge of 59.21 per cent in stock value.

He said the average yield of profit declared by the listed companies was in the range of 11.54 per cent while it was 9.12 per cent on various government investment schemes and 2.69 on treasury bills.

He said that the reform process was continued in KSE on transparent basis with the cooperation of stock brokers.

He was of the view that process of listing was slow due to slowdown in industrialization process.

Fudda said that a new company having a subscription amount of Rs200 million will be listed with KSE next month while Privatization Commission will float shares of four public sector companies through KSE.

Referring to term finance certificates (TFCs), he said that the TFC trade was almost negligible and KSE has approached State Bank of Pakistan in this regard.

Answering a question he said that KSE has provided the gateway facility to one brokerage house for conducting on-line trading and this brokerage house will start this business from next week.—APP