TSX Venture President Sings Praises Of Junior Market - Linda Hohol Says TSX Venture Exchange Is Home To Highly Motivated Entrepreneurs With Hopes And Dreams

After a banner year of listings and trading, TSX Venture Exchange has emerged as a major incubator of new and growing issuers. TSX Venture Exchange President Linda Hohol said, “We understand junior issuers and we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for companies to build their business, cultivate their management capabilities and add governance responsibilities so that they can move up to the senior market.”

She made her remarks during a keynote speech at the Communitech Tech Leadership Conference today in Kitchener-Waterloo.

2005 was a successful year for the junior market in Canada. 165 new companies listed while 46 companies graduated. According to Ms. Hohol, “Unlike most other exchanges, we see our job as helping companies grow as strong public companies.”

She added, “At TSX Group we believe that it’s in a stock exchange’s best longterm interests to list good companies and then do what it can to help them get even better and grow. Governance is one of the things that some of the best entrepreneurs tell us helped their companies get better.”

At the end of Q1 2006, there were 2,229 companies listed on TSX Venture and NEX. That's almost 50 per cent more than the 1,549 issuers listed on Toronto Stock Exchange. The majority are micro-caps: the average market cap of TSX Venture-listed companies was $24.4 million at the end of the quarter.

Copies of Ms. Hohol’s remarks are on tsx.com or by clicking here.