TASE on target for NIS 2 billion daily volume, says regulator

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange could pass the NIS 2 billion ($564 million) mark for daily trading within a year, Israel Securities Authority chairman Shmuel Hauser said on Monday.

After several years of slumping trade volumes and few new listings, the TASE has made major reforms aimed at boosting trade, including taking it private, loosening regulation for companies looking to list and removing hurdles for new trading members.

“A few years ago our bourse was like a ship on a collision course with an iceberg,” Hauser said at a conference on capital markets. “Open-heart surgery was needed, and that’s what we did.”

Average daily trade volume of NIS 2.1b. in 2010 had halved by 2012, in part because Israel lost out on passive inflows following a market upgrade by MSCI. Only three new companies joined the exchange in 2012, compared with 22 in 2010, with many local firms preferring to list abroad.

But volumes have steadily recovered, reaching an average of NIS 1.5b. a day in 2017, up 20% from 2016. And while the total number of companies on the exchange fell to 452 in 2016 from 600 in 2010, more new companies are looking to join.

“I hope trade volumes will grow to NIS 2 billion a day, and more, within about a year,” Hauser said. “I expect the number of new companies on the bourse to grow by more than 30 companies.”

He is also pushing the government to approve tax breaks for stock-market investors and wants a foreign partnership.

“I look forward to cooperating with a foreign exchange: if not Nasdaq, it will be the exchange in London; if not London, the Deutsche-Bourse exchange; and if not that, the Toronto exchange,” Hauser said, without elaborating.

(Reuters)