Nasdaq ties up with Sina to offer US stock market data to China’s growing pool of investors
The US exchange will license two of its products offering data on individual stocks as well as indices and exchange-traded funds
Nasdaq has agreed to offer Sina Corp, one of China’s largest web portals, real-time last sale data for all securities traded in the US market, eyeing the country’s growing pool of middle class investors who are hungry for asset diversification and seeking overseas investment opportunities.
Beijing-based Sina operates internet portal Sina.com and the Twitter-like social media service Weibo, which had 376 million monthly active users as of last September, more than Twitter’s 330 million.
Under the agreement, Nasdaq will make available the last traded prices of US stocks through its Nasdaq Last Sale data service, as well as the Nasdaq Global Index Data Service (GIDS), which offers data on exchange-traded funds and share indices.
“China has a growing population of sophisticated investors,” said Tomas Franczyk, Hong Kong-based managing director for Asia-Pacific at Nasdaq’s Global Information Services, in a phone interview.
“The growing pool of Chinese middle class investors is increasingly interested in diversifying their assets and looking for overseas investment opportunities.”
He said that Sina will offer the data across all its platforms, and may apply fees for the service.
Franczyk said China’s middle class is expected to grow by 850 million people by 2030, according to an OECD forecast, and will play a significant role in global economic prospects. They will form a new group of investors who have particular interest in equity markets, given the eight-year continuous highs in the US market and historic asset inflows into ETFs.
Interest in investing has grown in China in tandem with rising affluence. Wealth per adult has grown from US$5,410 in 2000 to US$26,870 in 2017, Credit Suisse said in its 2017 global wealth report in November.
Franczyk also said that in the past three years, Nasdaq had noticed a growing number of Chinese fintech companies that wanted to develop trade applications for domestic investors looking to diversify their wealth and investments globally.
The exchange had also seen stronger demand from existing Chinese corporate clients who wanted to expand the data feed services they got from US equities to options, futures, commodity products and other products in Europe, he said.
