When the London Stock Exchange bought Borsa Italiana in 2007, it gained a gem in Milan’s Italian Derivatives Exchange Market, with its diverse customer base of local retail and institutional investors, prop shops and banks. And as Tom Osborn discovers in Milan, possessing those twin loves of LSE boss Xavier Rolet – a liquid equity derivatives market and a clearing house – the exchange is fast becoming the jewel in the LSE’s crown.
Milan’s Idem market was the talk of the town at June’s International Derivatives Expo in London. “Idem had a sensational month,” as John Damgard, head of the Futures Industry Association, put it in his conference introduction.
Xavier Rolet, the former Lehman Brothers banker and now chief executive of LSE Group, called Idem (pictured) in his keynote address “a unique platform, designed to meet the needs of institutional...