Nomura opened the Chi-X Australia stock trading on Monday. The company promised to bring down prices by removing the monopoly of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).

The opening of Chi-X came days after the ASX suffered a four-hour technical glitch which halted morning trading. The new bourse will trade just eight securities this week. By next week it plans to provide an alternative platform for brokers selling and buying all shares in the S&P/ASX 200 Index.

"The whole advent of competition is going to lead to lower charges," Bloomberg quoted Angus Gluskie, who oversees more than $300 million at White Funds Management.

"But if you fragment the market too much and have multitude of participants, you're also likely to have less robust infrastructure, and that means a greater number of outages or technical issues," Mr Gluskie said.

The opening of Chi-X ends ASX's 150-year monopoly on stock trading in Australia. It could be the first competitor in Asia-Pacific's fourth-largest equity market since the Labor government plans to transform Australia into a financial hub by providing more competition in the country's equity market.

Chi-X Australia is a subsidiary of New York-based Chi-X Global, which is owned by Nomura Holdings, a Japanese investment group that has been operating in competition with some large European exchanges for several years.

Chi-X aims to attract volume by using the maker-taker pricing model in which brokers that offer to buy or sell securities pay 0.06 basis point of the trade's value and those that complete the transaction pay 0.12 basis point. The model is cheaper than ASX's which charges 0.15 basis point or 15 cents for every $10,000 for both sides of the trade.

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