A stock trade a day keeps stress away

ROYAL EXCHANGE

A stock trade a day keeps stress away By Alistair Scrutton THIMPHU

Traders seeking a break from volatile global markets may want to head to Bhutan’s bourse, where stocks are traded on just four computers — when they have not crashed — only twice a week. “I’ve got one order to sell 2,820 shares,” said 23-year-old Deki Peldon, the only broker for today’s short trading hours in Thimphu, the capital of the tiny Himalayan kingdom.“It’s taken 2 to 3 weeks to find a buyer.”

    Welcome to the Royal Bhutan stock exchange, where just four brokers work and which will trade about $3 million shares this year, about what many financiers may deal with in the blink of an eye. The average daily trade in New York is more than 1 billion.

    In a Buddhist country where national wealth is measured by Gross National Happiness — an idea that spiritual and environmental health are just as important as material well-being — the exchange is crawling slowly along as the country and its $1.3 billion economy tentatively embraces globalisation.

    In the stock exchange’s bare trading floor, computers sit on sparse wooden desks. There are no TVs on the walls, no shouts into telephones, no empty coffee cups or discarded paper.

    Peldon, dressed in traditional Bhutanese dress, typed in her one trade for the day before an 11 am deadline, when buy and sell orders are matched up by computer software that has not been updated since 1993. Total market capitalisation in 2008 was around $171 million, with 19 listed companies that include cement firms, banks and a newspaper. That compares with the capitalisation of nearly $67 billion for McDonalds.

    There is no stock index, but compilers of company listings say prices will often not change for three months.

    Still, trade is on an upward curve, sort of.

    “The concept of what is a market is poor in Bhutan,” said stock exchange chief executive office Tashi Yezer, dressed in a gho, a traditional kneelength robe. “But it’s picking up.”

    But the question does remain how Bhutan can fit any expansion of stock trading into their deeply held concept of Gross National Happiness, or as it is known here, GNH.

    Yezer had the answer: isolation from global markets means little price movements. People just collect their dividends, content with the return while companies just raise capital, the original idea of stock exchanges, he said.

    “If people make money, that makes them happy. If they lose, it makes them sad.” — Reuters