NCDEX to bring more commodities under spot trading

The National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX), the country’s second largest commodities futures trading platform, is working to get all commodities traded at NCDEX to the spot market in phases, according to its managing director R Ramaseshan.

Addressing the media Saturday, he said it recently included mustard for spot trading on the NSPOT. The spot market would promote trader-trader transactions in the first phase and farmer-trader business at later stage. This would help the commodity producers realise better prices for their produce. At present, 53 commodities were being traded on NCDEX.

It was also in process of constructing a rainfall index, which is computed through historical annual cumulative rainfall and adjusted with net surplus or deficit of actual cumulative rainfall as of that date and takes into account the impact of historical and actual rainfall during the period.

Also, NCDEX would relaunch the trading of steel for revising the trading structure. At present, the steel futures were not performing at expected levels.

Replying to a query, he said futures markets had a minimum role in the spiralling prices of commodities. The price was more demand-supply dependent, he said adding that the futures trading would only give out signals of possible trends such as increase or decrease in crop area, production volume and corrective actions to be taken.

There were controls such as cap on prices, margin levels and others to ensure that the prices remain unaffected due to speculation.