NASSAU, Bahamas (AP): SECURITIES MARKETS in the Caribbean need to cultivate large-scale investors before a region-wide stock exchange will work, a Jamaican official warned Monday."Until we get these institutional investors recognising the opportunities in the equities sector, it's gonna be a pretty uphill task," said Wain Iton, general manager of the Jamaican Stock Exchange.
Iton spoke Monday at a meeting of stock exchange officials in Nassau, Bahamas who are mulling the creation of a regional trading house.
He and other officials lamented the small number of investors in the region, saying a regional exchange would have to convince people to invest while simultaneously collecting information on companies and building a community of analysts to advise investors.
"If you don't have information on the particular prospective company in which you want to invest, you clearly are not going to invest in them," Iton said.
The chairman of the Bahamas Securities Commission, T. Baswell Donaldson, said brokers in his country only handle 500 to 600 securities accounts -- probably about 10,000 investors in all.
"If we are aiming for all adult Bahamians to own securities directly or indirectly at our current growth rate, we may have to wait some 20 to 30 years," Donaldson said.
He also noted that the 15 companies listed on the Bahamas exchange have listed no more than 20 per cent of their capital.
Iton said public pension funds in the Caribbean shy away from stocks.
The Jamaican National Investment Fund, valued at US$300 million in 1999, invested 16 per cent in equities, 74 per cent in fixed income and 10 per cent in real estate, he said citing Caribbean Investment Fund statistics.
Trinidad's US$700 million pension fund has 18 per cent in equities, 71 per cent in fixed income sources and 11 from real estate.
The Bahamas' US$850 million fund has just 0.3 per cent in equities, 99 percent in fixed incomes and 0.7 per cent in real estate.
