Shanghai supplanted Tokyo to become Asia’s biggest stock market by trading value in 2009 on the back of an 80% jump in the Shanghai Composite Index, Bloomberg reported. The total value of shares traded in Shanghai came to US$5.01 trillion compared to US$4.07 trillion in Tokyo. Shanghai ranked third globally after NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. Tokyo still leads Shanghai by stock market capitalization. Li Jun, a strategist at Central China Securities Holdings in Shanghai, noted that a high ratio of stocks tend to change hands in emerging markets and that increased new share sales contributed to the high turnover. Morgan Stanley has estimated that the introduction of short selling, margin trading and stock index futures in Shanghai – all three were approved on January 8 – could see transaction volume rise by 50%.
