Singapore’s US Stock Trading Push Draws Limited Interest

Singapore Exchange listed SDRs for Grab, Sea Ltd and SpaceX in July. Through Sept. 18, about $2.3 million in SpaceX SDRs had traded on SGX—0.0007% of the roughly $336.6 billion traded on Nasdaq in the same period. Grab and Sea SDRs together traded about $24 million, against $26 billion in US markets. SGX average daily turnover is roughly S$2 billion, or about $1.6 billion. The SDR programme launched in 2023 and now has 38 listings, including Thai, Indonesian and Hong Kong stocks. SGX has said the listings are meant to offer Asian-hours access to global companies, not to match home-market volumes. Luke Lim of Phillip Securities expects to launch more SDRs. Grab and Sea declined to comment; SpaceX did not respond. Nasdaq and NYSE Arca plan a Dec. 6 launch of 24-hour trading, and the London Stock Exchange expects extended-hours trading in the first half of next year. Contested: none found on the volume figures. On the low interest, Chris Forbes of CMC Markets called the rollout "anticlimactic" and said, "They're too late to the party ... everyone else has developed alternatives." Carmen Lee of OCBC said, "Many investors in Singapore still not quite familiar with SDRs," and noted they are not in benchmarks such as the Straits Times Index or MSCI indexes.