Suva: The year 2010 was one of those inimitable years that the Exchange had envisaged for sometime.

These were the sentiments echoed by South Pacific Stock Exchange (SPSE), chief executive officer Jinita Prasad.

“On July 1, 2010, the Exchange bid farewell to its antique open outcry system of call market and together with NSX and NASDAQ OMX it announced the successful launch of the Electronic Trading Platform (ETP),” she said.

Ms Prasad said, “In terms of the trading patterns, the Exchange experienced an improvement in the overall trading for the year 2010 compared to the previous year once the special crossing transactions of the year 2009 are excluded.

Special Crossing transactions are bilateral deals on the sale and purchase of larger quantities of shares in a security which are one-off transactions hence it is fair to exclude these as typical trades in effecting comparisons from prior periods.

According to a report released by the Exchange in aggregate, the SPSE trading platform facilitated trades of a total volume of 2.27 million shares in 711 transactions garnering an aggregate consideration of $2.66million.

In 2009 the total volume of shares traded was 1.61 million accumulating $2.25m in consideration in 777 transactions.

The volume and value of all the 12 special crossings executed in 2009 stood at 4.48 million shares and $41.29m respectively which burgeoned the total value for the year to $43.54m.

Overall market capitalisation fell 13.68 per cent over the 12 months reflecting drop in prices of 11 out of 17 securities listed.

Buy to sell ratio was around 1:16 on average during 2010 signifying a bear market with a huge dominance of sellers applying a downward pressure on prices.

“We saw a year of mixed investor sentiments where some investors disposed their shares to fund their cash needs and the others concentrated on the fundamentals of listed companies and continued to hold.

“Existing listed companies continued to be tightly held which also dampened the levels of trading,” she said.