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SPB Exchange may launch deliverable (physically settled) derivatives on foreign shares blocked in Russian depositories, its chief executive, Evgeny Serdyukov, said on 7 August, according to Kommersant.

Serdyukov said the exchange had initially considered launching trading directly in the blocked shares, as Moscow Exchange did in April 2025 when it allowed investors to conduct over-the-counter deals in the securities. After analysing how that trading had gone, however, the venue opted to launch derivatives instead, he said.

He noted that the shares trade on Moscow Exchange at a steep discount, that liquidity is extremely low and that the segment is a niche one. SPB Exchange told Kommersant it was too early to comment on the details of the project. T-Bank — with which the exchange launched trading in one-day futures on US shares this spring — likewise declined to comment in detail. The bank said only that "the project to start trading derivatives on blocked shares is still being worked on", but that "the positions of the bank and the exchange coincide".

After the European depositories Euroclear and Clearstream stopped working with Russia's National Settlement Depository in the spring of 2022, exchange trading in foreign securities became unavailable. Instead, a number of brokers (T-Investments and Finam), and later Moscow Exchange, organised over-the-counter trading in blocked assets within Russia's domestic financial system. Only qualified investors may buy and sell blocked assets; non-qualified (retail) investors are limited to selling.

Investors who bought foreign securities at a discount in over-the-counter trading had earlier run into the problem of a tax on the "material benefit" — the notional gain from buying below market value — with such tax sometimes exceeding the price of the asset itself, RBC reported.

Over-the-counter trading in foreign shares on Moscow Exchange is marked by extremely low liquidity, Kommersant notes. By the paper's calculations, total turnover in July 2026 in the ten most popular shares (Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Apple and others) came to about 150 million rubles, whereas total trading on the exchange on 7 August alone exceeded 58.2 billion rubles. This is explained by the very large discount between a security's price in over-the-counter trading and its value on foreign venues. As a result, asset holders are unwilling to sell at a marked-down price, while buyers who might be attracted by such low prices face large tax bills, sometimes comparable to the profit on the deal, the paper says.

Launching derivatives could partly offset this problem. As lawyers explain, a derivative has no "second price" on a foreign market. The discount on derivatives trading could therefore be significantly smaller, though it will not disappear entirely given sanctions restrictions, says Oleg Abelev, head of research at Rikom-Trust, an investment company.

Even so, experts believe that even this method will not allow SPB Exchange to eliminate the main drawback — the fact that the asset cannot circulate freely outside Russian infrastructure.

Most likely, on delivery the exchange would use shares that are already blocked and held within the Russian depository system, according to Yaroslav Kabakov, strategy director at Finam. In that case the security would remain blocked at the Western depository: the investor would be unable to receive dividends on it and could sell it only within Russian infrastructure. Moreover, once the investor takes possession of the security, all tax obligations would return and they would still have to pay tax on the difference between the price on the foreign exchange and the price at which the asset was acquired, he adds.

The instrument could therefore appeal only to professional traders willing to bet on the asset being unblocked in future, but it would not suit the mass-market investor, Kabakov concludes.