Last year was not ide­al for many busi­ness­es, but the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change (TTSE) saw the year as one full of mean­ing­ful progress.

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the TTSE, Eva Mitchell, ex­plained that while most of the list­ed com­pa­nies faced strug­gles, there con­tin­ued to be in­creased in­ter­est by new in­vestors over the year.

“Al­though our trad­ing vol­umes were low­er, year on year, what re­al­ly ex­cites us is the fact that we’ve seen a steady in­crease in re­tail ac­tiv­i­ty over the last three years, par­tic­u­lar­ly in 2023. Our re­tail trades went up by at least 10 per cent, which is a phe­nom­e­nal achieve­ment. It means that one of our mar­ket­ing ef­forts, our strate­gic ini­tia­tives to­ward bring­ing more at­ten­tion and mak­ing the ex­change more at­trac­tive to re­tail in­vestors is be­ing achieved,” said Mitchell, dur­ing an in­ter­view at the TTSE’s of­fice at Nicholas Tow­ers on Fri­day.

Apart from in­vestor in­ter­est, there were al­so some ma­jor achieve­ments by list­ed com­pa­nies as well.

“From a mar­ket per­spec­tive, even though we would have seen some falling prices in 2023, we’ve ac­tu­al­ly had some com­pa­nies that per­formed even bet­ter in 2023. They hit some all-time highs, they reg­is­tered record per­for­mances. There are some com­pa­nies that would have reg­is­tered growth of up to 49 per cent,” she said.

Mitchell al­so hailed the en­cour­ag­ing use of the dig­i­tal plat­forms set up by the TTSE in the past year.

“One oth­er thing I’d like to high­light is, we launched our on­line trad­ing plat­form dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. And it has con­tin­u­ous­ly out­per­formed our ex­pec­ta­tions. As a mat­ter of fact, for De­cem­ber 2023, trades on our on­line trad­ing plat­form ac­count­ed for 32 per cent of to­tal mar­ket trades, which is a sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment for us. This is some­thing that we’re go­ing to lever­age and build on in 2024,” said Mitchell, who stressed that the TTSE was ea­ger to build on that mo­men­tum this year by step­ping up mar­ket­ing and en­cour­ag­ing new in­vestors as well as new com­pa­ny list­ings on the ex­change.

The lat­ter is a key fo­cus for the TTSE in 2024. A men­tor­ship pro­gramme was es­tab­lished in 2022 geared to­ward guid­ing Small and Medi­um En­ter­pris­es(SMEs) through the nec­es­sary steps to achieve list­ing. How­ev­er, on Jan­u­ary 5, the TTSE signed an agree­ment with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of Com­merce that will fur­ther boost ef­forts to get SMEs on board.

“What I do ex­pect go­ing for­ward is that the TTSE will con­tin­ue to ac­cel­er­ate its ef­forts in terms of rais­ing our pro­file in terms of rais­ing our aware­ness. We have a de­tailed plan with re­spect to the SME mar­ket. You would have seen us sign some MOUs with­in the last month or so, which is re­al­ly about re-em­pha­sis­ing our com­mit­ment and re-en­gag­ing the stake­hold­ers to en­sure that we send the right mes­sage and we raise aware­ness about the op­por­tu­ni­ties, rel­a­tive to list­ing on the SME mar­ket,” she said, adding that there had been sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est from busi­ness­es to get list­ed.

“We have a list of at least 20 (com­pa­nies) in our pipeline that we are in dis­cus­sions with and we are con­fi­dent that at least some will make it through to list­ing, bear­ing in mind that there’s a long ges­ta­tion pe­ri­od for these com­pa­nies,” she said.

How­ev­er Mitchell did note while most com­pa­nies in Trinidad and To­ba­go re­mained prof­itable and as a re­sult large­ly re­mained great val­ue for in­vestors, the in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate still re­quired a lev­el of cau­tion.

“I re­main cau­tious­ly op­ti­mistic, the truth and the fact is 2023 was a ris­ing in­ter­est rate en­vi­ron­ment re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. That im­pacts the at­trac­tive­ness of the stock mar­ket,” she said, “We haven’t ex­pe­ri­enced that sort of en­vi­ron­ment lo­cal­ly in terms of our in­ter­est rates. But what I would say is that our list­ed com­pa­nies main­tained sta­bil­i­ty, they’ve main­tained their prof­itabil­i­ty, most of them. They’ve re­ward­ed their in­vestors for be­ing share­hold­ers of their com­pa­nies by way of div­i­dends. “

She not­ed that the per­for­mance of lo­cal­ly list­ed com­pa­nies did un­der­line the cur­rent strength of the lo­cal econ­o­my in the face of sev­er­al se­vere in­ter­na­tion­al head­winds, and this was en­cour­ag­ing for peo­ple con­sid­er­ing in­vest­ing in the lo­cal mar­ket.

“I’m con­fi­dent that the en­vi­ron­ment is go­ing to be one where com­pa­nies un­der­stand and be­lieve that there’s a lev­el of re­silience and agili­ty that we need to move for­ward with in or­der for us to re­main rel­e­vant. Part of that agili­ty is look­ing at your fund­ing op­tions. And of course, as part of those fund­ing op­tions, eq­ui­ty should al­ways be con­sid­ered at the right time. The TTSE will then po­si­tion it­self to en­sure that we are in­volved in these dis­cus­sions and to en­sure that we raise aware­ness es­pe­cial­ly as re­lates to the ben­e­fits of the SME mar­ket,” said Mitchell.

She al­so ex­plained that while T&T does have for­eign ex­change is­sues, there is still high liq­uid­i­ty in terms of the T&T dol­lar in­vest­ments, and this would serve as a fer­tile ground for com­pa­nies look­ing at an eq­ui­ty op­tion as a fund­ing op­tion.