Nicaragua joined the El Salvador-Panama Integrated Stock Market, with which investors from those nations may choose to trade securities that have been issued —or are being traded— in any of the three countries. The initiative, which began to take shape in 2015, is waiting for the integration of the stock markets of Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras.
According to a publication by the Nicaraguan Stock Exchange, in 2022 “investors bought securities for fifty-nine billion córdobas. The volume traded contracted 25% compared to the previous year, but it is still an amount 25% higher than traded in 2017which is a pre-crisis and pre-pandemic year.”
During the integration act, held at the headquarters of the Salvadoran stock market, its president, Rolando Duarte, said that the sum of the three seats is “an efficient and transparent way of doing stock market business”, by making available “the operational infrastructure that facilitates cross-border operations through remote operators, with the greatest beneficiaries being Salvadorans, Panamanians and now Nicaraguans, who will have a stock market with greater liquidity, depth and dynamism”.
The integration that until now only included El Salvador and Panama, allowed 2,403 operations to be carried out in which 343 million dollars (USD 535 million, if the Correspondent Agreements are added) were transacted from 2017 to date.
The executive president of Latinex, Olga Cantillo, explained that the tripartite integration will allow investors to be offered a market with outstanding securities of more than USD 54 billion, 346 issuers and 49 stock exchanges, noting that “we are at different stages with the rest of the countries and we are confident that our efforts will yield results in the medium term”.
The general manager of the Nicaraguan Stock Exchange, Gerardo Argüello, pointed out that by adding Nicaragua to the joint Cuscatleca and Canal experience, the Nicaraguan stock market will expand its horizons beyond the country’s borders, and will multiply by sixty, “in terms of the assets that investors will be able to acquire through the future Nicaraguan remote operators that will be accredited in El Salvador and Panama.”
He also pointed out that, additionally, Nicaraguan issuers will see opportunities grow “to place their instruments and finance the growth of their companies in a more competitive, dynamic and promising space”, detailing that, if it was difficult to reach the moment of signing, it will be even more so, getting issuers and investors to take advantage of it.
“Today we begin a new stage. Perhaps more difficult than the achievement we celebrate today. We have created a stock highway so that securities can move freely between our markets. Now, the challenge is to fill it with an increasingly intense traffic of businesses that results in benefits and added value for our industries, issuers, and especially investors”, he admitted.
In the aforementioned publication, the Nicaraguan Stock Exchange indicates its intention to expand through the stock exchanges, and to be able to “offer investment options to those countries more fluidly. At the same time, we hope to have the entry of investors from those countries to our market to encourage investment in the current instruments and the new opportunities that will arise in the course of the year”.
