The new Market Rules provide improvements over several areas relating to the Bourse’s main operations. The rules will provide margin trading that will sequentially enhance the liquidity in the market and also allow non-Bahraini brokers who are licensed by capital market regulatory institutions in their countries to trade on the Bahrain Bourse without having a representative office in the Kingdom of Bahrain, given that an authorized clearing member should be appointed to settle transactions executed at the Bourse.

In addition, the rules outline the general framework for market makers and the mechanisms that should be used to organise their buy and sell transactions. A notable area is the reduction of the number of exceptional cases from sixteen cases to four cases only, which will have a positive impact on the main market.

The new rules allows the trading of new investment instruments such as options, ETFs, REITS, and include other areas related to developing trading mechanisms at the Bourse.