SARAJEVO (Bosnia and Herzegovina), November 6 (SeeNews) – The two Bosnian bourses and the Vienna Stock Exchange will create a new joint index, which will follow the six most liquid companies in Bosnia, the Sarajevo bourse said late on Thursday.
BAXT (Bosnian Trade Index) will be the first single index for the capital markets in Bosnia’s Sarajevo and Banja Luka and its launch will lead to a significant increase in the Bosnian market liquidity as the issuer of each product based on the index must include adequate volumes of shares of those companies in the index.
Its calculation will start on December 1, the Sarajevo bourse said in a statement after an agreement among the three bourses was signed in Vienna earlier in the day.
The two Bosnian stock exchanges belong to each of the country's two autonomous parts - the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic, which have their own separate capital industry legislations, listed companies and brokerages.
BAXT will initially include four companies from the Federation’s Sarajevo Stock Exchange: BH Telecom, power utility Elekotroprivreda BiH, cigarette producer Fabrika Duhana Sarajevo and drug firm Bosnalijek, and two companies from the Serb Republic’s Banja Luka Stock Exchange – Telekom Srpske and Nova Banka.
The maximum participation of each company in the index is limited to 25%.
The Federation and Republic were formed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement which put an end to Bosnia’s three-year ethnic war. The two parts have not only separate capital markets but also separate governments and budgets, which, together with the country’s weak central government, turns Bosnia into a sluggish functioning state.
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