LME making ‘incremental progress’ in reviving investor confidence after last year’s nickel fiasco, CEO Chamberlain says
- The 146-year-old metal trading bourse is doing something every day to earn investors’ trust, Matthew Chamberlain says
- LME unveiled an action plan on March 30, which includes a series of measures that will be rolled out gradually over two years, to revive its markets
The CEO of London Metal Exchange (LME) said the 146-year-old metal trading bourse is making incremental progress in reviving investors’ confidence after last year’s chaos, hoping to gain a stronger presence in Asia.
“I don’t think restoring confidence is something that just happens overnight,” Matthew Chamberlain told the Post on the sidelines of the LME Asia Metals Seminar in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “Every day you have to show you’re doing something to earn that trust, and people have to see the market behaving as it should, which it is, and then eventually, you get there.
“It’s always going to be an incremental process. I’ve spoken to a lot of people at this conference who said that ‘we’re starting to put a little bit of business [on the LME] and we’ll see how it goes.’ That’s great.”
Large off-exchange positions in nickel were partially blamed for the chaos in the nickel market last March, as the metal’s price soared more than 270 per cent over a three-day period following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, triggering nearly US$16 billion in margin calls.
The LME, which is owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), was ultimately forced to suspend trading and cancel billions of dollars of transactions on March 8, 2022, a move that has sparked a series of legal actions by investors over the bourse’s response.
Since then the LME has introduced a series of measures to try to avoid similar situations in future, including daily price limits for contracts that require metals to be physically delivered when a futures contract expires.
