One of the only online brokers connected to all available exchanges in Australia.

One of the only online brokers connected to all available exchanges in Australia.

The United States have the main board as well as the NASDAQ, which is for smaller companies or those that are a bit more ‘tech’.

In Australia, we have the ASX, but because of the virtual monopoly that they have, they can control the companies that list - using their full discretion. Often this will mean that a company meets the listing rules, but cannot list, and therefore cannot gain the capital that they need to grow.

Companies like Atlassian and Canva left Australia to go to the United States to access the capital that they needed, and it is unfair to draw a direct line between the discretion of the ASX and their need to leave Australia…but it sure would have been better for Australia if they had stayed here!

In Australia, we also have the NSX. It is also a tier one exchange, like the ASX. It currently suffers from low traded volumes. With low traded volumes it struggles to attract more companies. With fewer companies there is little visibilility for the companies that are listed.

Most online trading companies in Australia, if not all, are motivated by the amount of brokerage that they can generate. So they won’t offer access to the NSX market, as they don’t currently trade often enough for them to justify the cost.

But Marketech is a tech company, so we understand the frustrations of trying to list on the ASX. We are also motivated by our business model to make our platform more functional – not to have you trade more – so we made it a point of pride that we connected the NSX market, and we did it to show that we could! We also believe there should be a place for smaller technology companies to list in Australia.

Marketech Focus is still the only online trading company that allows you to trade on all three major exchanges – ASX, CBOE and NSX. But unless there is more traded volume on the NSX, the other online companies will not follow us in. If they do not, we risk never having an ‘Australian NASDAQ’ to offer a way for innovative technology companies to access the capital that they need to grow, and we risk pushing all the good technology developed by Australian innovators offshore.


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