FTSE Mondo Visione Exchanges Index:
Riga Stock Exchange January Round-Up
Date 11/02/2000
The Riga Stock Exchange started its first business day of the new millenium with no anxiety. The RSE trading systems, as well as the systems of the RSE Members, Latvian Central Depository and Bank of Latvia proved to be Y2K-compliant.
The new millennium started with sweeping and exceedingly promising changes for the Latvian capital market. At the end of 1999, the Securities Market Commission of Latvia issued instructions obliging the custodi-ans to report all over-the-counter transactions with Latvia-registered securities to the Latvian Central Depository. Consequently, starting with year 2000, there is only one turnover for the Latvian capital market.
Latvian capital market turnover for January amounted to LVL 23.87 million, which is a 988% increase over the previous month. Debt market has become the leading segment in Latvian capital market. Trading with government debt paper of various maturities built 78.4% of the total market turnover.
The primary placement of Government 3 year T-bond with a 9.25% coupon rate, executed by the Bank of Latvia, was heavily oversubscribed; subsequently, the bond was in great demand on the secondary market as well, contributing over LVL 10 million to the capital market turnover.
Equity market also experienced an increase of activity, with Unibanka (LVL 1.8 million) as the leader in terms of traded volumes.
Domestic market capitalisation was LVL 293.66 million on the last trading day of January, which is a 41.2% increase over the close of the previous month. Starting with January, only domestic companies are listed on the RSE.
In February, a cash auction of Latvijas Hipoteku un zemes banka mortgage bonds is scheduled at the Riga Stock Exchange: another 4900 mortgage bonds with total face value of 490,000 will become available on the market.