Tokyo, 10 August 2010

Tokyo Commodity Exchange, Inc. ( TOCOM) today announced that the Exchange enabled Foreign Commodity Brokers to participate in its market through Intermediaries and amended its Market Rules accordingly. This expands the number of ways through which a foreign market participant can trade on the TOCOM markets.

Until now, Foreign Commodity Brokers who wished to trade on the TOCOM markets needed to either acquire membership from the Exchange or consign trades directly to a TOCOM Broker Member (a member licensed to accept the consignment of trades in the commodity markets). However, recently, several Broker Members have converted their business category to “Intermediary”, under which they can intermediate the consignment of trades for commodity markets to a Broker Member, and some Foreign Commodity Brokers have also newly entered the market as Intermediaries, which led to an increased number of Intermediaries in Japan. Some of these Intermediaries actively pursue overseas marketing activities and a number of companies wished to be allowed to intermediate trades from Foreign Commodity Brokers.

In response to such needs, TOCOM has decided to lift restrictions on market access by Foreign Commodity Brokers in order to improve the convenience of its market. Having received approval from the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry today, the Exchange has amended its Market Rules and Brokerage Rules accordingly and made them effective immediately.

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