[2007-12-07]  Tunisia bourse introduces new trading system
Tunisia's stock market introduced a new electronic quotation system on Monday to handle a bigger transaction volume and encourage more rational dealing by combining deal values in a single price, traders said.

Around 50 firms are listed on the small Tunis bourse which has a capitalisation of $3.83 billion and is growing as the banking sector develops and economic growth accelerates.

Among the changes announced in a statement on its Web site was a new maximum daily trading range for stocks on the main market of 6 percent. Traders said the previous limit was 4.5 percent.

They said the new quotation system will boost market performance, lower costs and encourage more rational trading behaviour as market players will no longer see who is buying and selling what at what price.

"The market is anonymous in the new system," said Tarek Khemiri, a trader at BNA Capitaux. "We can know neither the other traders nor their trade values, which means more stability."

"The fact of knowing the identity of buyers and sellers and seeing their offers influenced the market price. If one sold his shares, they followed him."

The new stock quotation system, V900, will also be able to deal with a bigger order volume.

The new system "is more developed and can process higher number of orders during the fixing period," said Mohsen Materi, a trader at Finacorp.

"We faced some problems when we had strong transaction volumes, especially during IPOs," he said. "The old system was not able to deal with all the demand."

The benchmark Tunindex rose 0.54 percent to 2,606.29 points on Monday.

Analysts said the index will probably have risen 20 percent by the end of the year after a 44 percent gain in 2006.

Trading on the main Tunis market takes place between 9 and 11:40 a.m. with a pre-opening from 9 to 10 a.m., negotiation from 10 to 11:30 a.m. and closing price fixing at 11:35 a.m.


Source: © Reuters 2007.