The T&T stock mar­ket is work­ing on a project to al­low the trade in the per­for­mance of an in­ter­na­tion­al in­dex such as the S&P 500 or the Nas­daq on the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE) us­ing TT dol­lars.

Chair­man of the TTSE Ian Nar­ine made the an­nounce­ment at the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s Cap­i­tal Mar­ket Con­fer­ence 2023, which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency on Fri­day.

The Stan­dard and Poor’s 500, or sim­ply the S&P 500, is a mar­ket of 500 of the largest com­pa­nies in the Unit­ed States. It is one of the most com­mon­ly fol­lowed eq­ui­ty in­dices.

Ac­cord­ing to Nar­ine, all the de­tails of this ini­tia­tive are not to­tal­ly with­in the TTSE’s con­trol, but he not­ed that mar­ket de­vel­op­ment re­quires col­lab­o­ra­tion.

“If we are suc­cess­ful, then the aim at this time is to even­tu­al­ly be able to trade in lo­cal and re­gion­al in­dices as well. This gives the lo­cal in­vestor ac­cess to the mar­ket in a way that they have nev­er had be­fore. That project along with the dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion ini­tia­tive cur­rent­ly un­der­way at the T&T Stock Ex­change and Cen­tral De­pos­i­to­ry de­ter­mined the theme for this con­fer­ence.”

This year’s con­fer­ence was “Cap­i­tal Mar­ket Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion: Trends and Trans­for­ma­tions.”

Re­gard­ing in­vest­ment, he not­ed that T&T has an ag­ing pop­u­la­tion and that peo­ple need to in­vest and man­age their in­comes for their re­tire­ment years.

Nar­ine ad­vised, there­fore, that good port­fo­lio man­age­ment re­quires di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion so that peo­ple can hold as­sets where the val­ue is de­rived from with­in T&T and al­so where the val­ue is de­rived out­side of T&T.

The TTSE chair­man said as in­di­vid­ual in­vestors, there is the chal­lenge of lim­it­ed ac­cess to for­eign ex­change for the pur­pose of in­vest­ing.

This is a na­tion­al prob­lem the TTSE is at­tempt­ing to solve.

“Our project is on­go­ing. The ul­ti­mate ben­e­fi­cia­ry is the pub­lic of T&T, who would be able to in­vest in the per­for­mance of the US, and maybe even oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets, in TT dol­lars through their lo­cal stock­bro­ker.

“If we are suc­cess­ful, that changes the game. It changes the lo­cal in­vest­ing land­scape. There is, how­ev­er, still much work to be done,” said Nar­ine.

He as­sured that the lo­cal stock ex­change re­mains com­mit­ted to help­ing T&T not on­ly come on­to the curve, but even­tu­al­ly get ahead of the curve.

“We must be­come aware, start to keep up, mas­ter and then get ahead of in­dus­try trends. Small emerg­ing economies have to grow at a faster rate than large de­vel­oped economies to be­come a de­vel­oped econ­o­my. De­vel­op­ment is a mov­ing tar­get. It is not sta­t­ic,” Nar­ine fur­ther ad­vised.

Out­side of in­vest­ing, there are two ways to ob­tain rich­es from busi­ness.

Ac­cord­ing to Nar­ine, “You can do so from the val­ue you are able to ex­tract from your busi­ness op­er­a­tions or you can gain from the val­u­a­tion you get from your busi­ness.

“If you re­ly on ex­tract­ing val­ue from your busi­ness, then at age 60 you have to hope that the busi­ness con­tin­ues on at the same rate in­to your 70s and 80s so that you can con­tin­ue to ex­tract both for you and now for an ex­tend­ed fam­i­ly,” he added.

On the trends which are dri­ving to­wards re­gion­al cap­i­tal mar­kets, Pres­i­dent of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL) Nigel Bap­tiste at­trib­uted this to the ex­pec­ta­tions of clients.

“The ex­pec­ta­tion for this is flex­i­bil­i­ty and speed that has dri­ven the changes over the last 30 years, it is re­al­ly fu­elling a de­mand for a re­gion­al ap­proach to the cap­i­tal mar­kets but we are far from a re­gion­al ap­proach to the cap­i­tal mar­kets right now,” Bap­tiste said. He not­ed that while some progress has been made, it still in the “the­o­ry stages.”

The chal­lenge, ac­cord­ing to Bap­tiste, is to ad­dress the ap­pli­ca­tion.

Not­ing that there are “two in­gre­di­ents” re­quired in or­der for the ap­pli­ca­tion to be­come a bit more read­i­ly adopt­ed, Bap­tiste out­lined these as first­ly, the reg­u­la­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment.

“The reg­u­la­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment in the Caribbean as a re­gion and in­di­vid­u­al­ly is go­ing to have to evolve and sec­ond­ly, the ICT in­fra­struc­ture which has to al­so evolve in or­der for the clients who want to take ad­van­tage of the flex­i­bil­i­ty, the trans­paren­cy and the speed etc to ac­tu­al­ly be able to en­joy it,” Bap­tiste added.

He was speak­ing dur­ing a pan­el at the con­fer­ence which was themed, “Chart­ing the dig­i­tal fu­ture of the re­gion­al cap­i­tal mar­kets with fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions as nav­i­ga­tors.”

Nigel Ed­wards, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion, who was al­so part of the pan­el agreed that the fo­cus on the clients was im­por­tant.

“If we start fo­cus­ing on the clients and what’s im­por­tant to the clients that helps us to de­ter­mine how we move the dig­i­tal con­ser­va­tion for­ward and how we evolve cap­i­tal mar­kets,” he stat­ed.

Ed­wards fur­ther agreed that ICT in­fra­struc­ture is crit­i­cal as, if this is not in place, then there’s the risk of some peo­ple be­ing left be­hind.

“We cre­ate this ten­sion be­tween the ones who have ac­cess and those who don’t and this cre­ates all kinds of so­cial dis­place­ment is­sues and part of the role be­comes how do we fa­cil­i­tate that fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion, how do we fa­cil­i­tate the de­vel­op­ment of the in­fra­struc­ture and mak­ing sure that the plat­forms that are need­ed are de­vel­oped in such a way that ‘as the sea ris­es all boats rise’ with them,” Ed­wards added.