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espite domestic and global challenges prompting many businesses to lay low, the Jakarta Futures Exchange (JFX) appears confident about its ability to record a rising number of transactions.

JFX president director, Stephanus Paulus Lumintang ,said the year 2019 would see challenges from the ongoing trade war between the United States and China as well as Indonesia’s presidential and legislative elections.

Paulus, however, said those challenges would not affect the JFX as much as the US presidential election and the Brexit vote had done. He added that the exchange had generally recorded good transaction figures over the past four years despite the disruptions.

“The trade war may have a negative impact in terms of a decrease of consumption, but it also brings instability that will see currencies and commodity prices fluctuate,” Paulus told reporters recently. “The volatility will be good for Indonesian businesses within the JFX as they will transact more.”

He said the trend of decreasing commodity prices in 2018 had not affected the JFX, pointing out that multilateral transactions last year exceeded the target by 10.9 percent at 1.33 million lots.

Gold, the price of which fluctuated considerably throughout 2018, dominated last year’s transactions at 42 percent or 576,854 lots, followed by coffee beans at 38.4 percent, olein at 13.7 percent and cocoa beans at 4.7 percent.

For this year, the JFX has lifted its transaction targets by 20 percent for both bilateral transactions at 1.45 million lots and multilateral transactions at 5.4 million lots.

Multilateral trade is a transaction mechanism where the bargaining process takes place openly at the bourse and involves multiple parties, whereas bilateral trade is a transaction that involves only two parties and takes place outside of the bourse, better known as over-the-counter (OTC) trade.

The JFX, said Paulus, would manage the risks by focusing on the most-wanted commodities, adding that gold would remain a top commodity to trade in 2019.

The JFX is slated to issue sharia-based gold contracts in a move that is currently awaiting approval from the Trade Ministry’s Futures Exchange Supervisory Board.

“God willing, the contract can be approved by the end of January, so that we can start promoting it in February and launch it by the fasting month of Ramadan [in May],” Paulus said.

Furthermore, rubber trading contracts were being planned, he said, adding that realizing the plan would depend on an agreement between Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as members of the International Tripartite Rubber Council.

Speaking on the same occasion, the president director of the state-owned Indonesian Derivatives Clearing House, Fajar Wibhiyadi, said despite the uncertainty that it brings, instability would help the market flow.

“With more risks, there will be more transactions as [investors] will hedge their investments to manage the risks,” said Fajar.

Fajar believed investors would become even more keen to trade this year, thanks to the increasing support of financial technology in investing.

“So we are optimistic that the average volume of transactions this year will increase from last year,” he said.

JFX’s Paulus said it would also increase investment campaigns toward the millennials to attract new investors to the exchange, noting that the JFX had more than 500,000 investors as of 2018.