The article contains information on the activities of the St. Petersburg International Commodity Exchange. It describes its mode of operation, the rules and the course of trading, serving brokers in St. Petersburg MTSB and available tools.
Short story
For the first time, Saint Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange closed joint-stock company was registered in May 2008. The first auction on SPbMTSB with kerosene and diesel fuel was held on September 23, 2008.
Today, the St. Petersburg International Commodity and Raw Materials Stock Exchange (CJSC SPbMTSB) is one of the largest Russian commodity exchanges. The Bank of Russia Financial Markets Service granted it license No. 040-004 in November 2013.
Exchange work
The St. Petersburg Oil Products Exchange operates according to the following schedule:
From 10:45 to 11:00 - work on the accumulation of user applications.
From 11:00 to 13:00 - a bilateral counter auction of nominations by anonymous participants in the SET (electronic trading system).
From 14:00 to 20:00 - the process of issuing documents based on the results of the current day trading.
SPIMEX is represented by the markets:
- petroleum products;
- trading indices and futures;
- gas;
- crude oil;
- the woods;
- coal;
- agricultural products, grain;
- information products.
Basic concepts of stock trading
In the market, everything depends on supply and demand. If there is little commodity and demand is high, then prices are rising. Conversely, if there is a surplus of goods and there are a lot of them, and demand is low, prices fall. Traders playing on the stock exchange are like intermediaries between these values.
In the bidding process, the concept of "lot" is used, showing the quantity of goods bought or sold in a single transaction.
The main indicator in the work of traders is not the amount of money earned, but the amount of money that was lost.
The main person on the exchange is a broker - this is the one who receives orders from external clients. The beauty of trading is in its dynamics, and the broker acts as a conductor. Very often, the course of trading on the market becomes unstable. To make the process a little manageable, there is a whole arsenal of mechanisms and trading tools on trading exchanges.
Delivery versus payment as a new tool
St. Petersburg Petroleum Product Exchange SPIMEX announced a new practically revolutionary project “Delivery versus Payment”, its other name is “Commodity Delivery Operator”. The initiator of this approach was the FAS in order to obtain another indicator of the prices of small wholesale in addition to indicators of large wholesale and retail price. Its purpose is to accelerate turnover at oil depots in small wholesale.
Earlier, on the commodity exchange, according to the established procedure, it was possible to trade on the basis of “ex-reservoir” or according to the scheme on the basis of “pick-up”, and the contract term was determined as (T + 10), that is, the time from the conclusion of the transaction to day of its implementation. Now, between the seller and the buyer, a new bidder is introduced, called the commodity supply operator, which settles the goods.
In real time, online payments are made through the RTK terminal and for goods through the goods delivery operator. Previously, the buyer had to first make a one hundred percent prepayment for the product, then wait about thirty days for delivery of the purchased product. During the time that the goods were loaded, delivered, unloaded, its price on the exchange also did not stand still, but grew. As a result, the buyer had to pay a lot more than the original contract value.The St. Petersburg Exchange of Petroleum Products with its innovations in online trading has allowed an order of magnitude increase in the turnover rate. This gives an obvious advantage. In addition, SPbEX brokers provide a high guarantee of the transaction due to the fact that all payments go through the central operator, and not directly.
New schemes in the sales market
Any price is a product of non-resistance of the parties to the transaction and during exchange trading is regulated only by supply and demand of raw materials. An important advantage of the new electronic tool lies in the fact that the operator does not have one specific supplier, there are many of them, and the position of the seller and the buyer is quickly changing. At any time, the buyer can act as the seller himself, and the seller as the buyer.
The bidding process with the introduction of the new system enables a market participant who has a cash gap and has commodity balances, for example, at a tank farm, to raise money in real time on the security of these balances using a REPO scheme, which means a purchase with an obligation to resell.
Services of SPbMTSB CJSC
The St. Petersburg Exchange of Petroleum Products provides its customers with a new service called “Leverage with Pre-Collateral”, which is also called margin lending. Transactions with leverage significantly increase the purchasing power of participants (a multiple of the established leverage). 
Depending on the leverage for each ruble of the client that he is ready to invest in the goods, SPbEX brokers add their funds. Thus, leverage is a kind of leverage for the client, applied at the right time of bidding to increase its working capital. The St. Petersburg Exchange of Petroleum Products is very loyal to the customer’s acceptance. A bank may refuse a loan to a merchant, but here, trading with margin leverage, in fact, he always gets it.
In this new product, the employees of SPbMTSB CJSC sewed up the principle of transparent pricing, relying on the transport differential understood by all bidders, on stock indices and the dealer margin agreed upon with the client. All this forms the final price of raw materials, for example, at a tank farm. At the same time, the commission is deducted from the cost to the broker for the “negative balance” (the difference between the transaction value and the pre-deposited asset) in accordance with the specified leverage, which is approximately fifteen percent. To receive the goods, the buyer must pay the remaining cost. Every day until the full settlement of the transaction, brokers give the client a commission for storage services at current prices. The price of the goods does not change.
Prospects for the development of the Russian commodity market
The development of the commodity area will certainly be. An action plan was signed for the Exchange Committee for 2017 with clear objectives and deadlines, which are monitored by the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Ministry of Energy.
As part of this project, the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange has begun developing a tool for selling unselected volumes of oil products for the current reporting period.
