The story
TOCOM was established in 1984 with the merger of the Tokyo Textile Exchange, founded in 1951, the Tokyo Rubber Exchange, and the Tokyo Gold Exchange. The exchange became a for-profit shareholder-owned company in 2008.
It launched the current trading platform based on the Nasdaq OMX technology in 2009. TOCOM will use Japan Exchange Group's new derivatives trading platform, Next J-Gate, from September 2016.
In 2019 TOCOM was acquired by JPX.
The retail electricity market in Japan was fully liberalized in April 2016, followed by a series of reforms in the electricity sector in Japan, such as the revision of the rules on power grids and the establishment of a baseload electricity market of the Japan Electric Power Exchange (JEPX). Against this background, the size of the JEPX wholesale electricity market expanded rapidly to reach approximately one-third of the total electricity demand in Japan. As most of the power companies that newly entered the retail power market rely on JEPX for procurement, the importance of JEPX increased and the need to hedge price volatility risk rose.
In September 2019, to meet such demands, TOCOM listed four electricity futures contracts on a trial basis: East Area Baseload Electricity, West Area Baseload Electricity, East Area Peakload Electricity and West Area Peakload Electricity.
In 2020, to centralize commodity trading and clearing operations, its non-energy futures markets were transferred to the Osaka Exchange and put under the management of Japan Securities Clearing Corporation (JSCC), which absorbed Japan Commodity Clearing House Co., Ltd. (JCCH), a subsidiary of TOCOM. This left TOCOM with only fuel and electricity futures trading.
On 5 August 2020, TOCOM's head office relocated from the Tokyo Commodity Exchange Horidome Building in the Nihonbashi Horidomechō district to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Building in Tokyo's financial district, Nihonbashi Kabutochō.
On 4 April 2022, TOCOM listed LNG (Platts JKM) futures contracts on a trial basis and changed the listing status of the electricity futures from trial listing to permanent listing. This will improve the market convenience of TOCOM as a “Consolidated Energy Derivatives Exchange” where one can trade the electricity futures and the fuel futures in one-stop trading environment, enabling fuel price risk management for gas-fired power plants.
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On 19 January 2023, JPX signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with JEPX so that TOCOM's electricity futures market and JEPX's electricity spot market could work together and share information to increase the convenience and competitiveness of the Japanese power market. In 2022, fluctuations in electricity prices intensified due to several factors, such as rising fuel prices caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and concerns about power supply shortages in the summer and winter. Under these circumstances, the role of these markets to ensure stable power supply and hedge price fluctuation risks became even more important.
On 18 March 2024, TOCOM began trading of weekly electricity futures contracts in order to meet the need for hedging during periods of large temporary fluctuations in electricity demand, such as Golden Week and Obon.
On 26 May 2025, TOCOM launched fiscal year electricity futures trading in order to meet the need for hedging transactions during the Japanese fiscal year from April to March of the following year. Long-term bilateral contracts under which Japanese power generation companies and electricity retailers (ja:小売電気事業者) buy and sell electricity are generally conducted on a fiscal year basis.
From Wikipedia’s article on Tokyo Commodity Exchange, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4