Record year for the Bucharest Stock Exchange: total trading value exceeds 24 billion RON in 2022

The capital market in Romania managed to reach new all-time highs on three levels of liquidity after the year 2022 was marked by volatility and uncertainties, registering new highs at the level of total trading value, average daily liquidity, and number of transactions.

Thus, the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) reached a new record in 2022 in terms of the total value of transactions carried out on all markets with all types of financial instruments after total transactions exceeded RON 24 billion, up 11% from the level of 2021, when this value was RON 21.6 billion. In the equity segment, total transactions of almost RON 13.5 billion were made last year.

In 2022, 251 trading sessions took place at the BVB, and this translated into an average daily trading liquidity for all types of financial instruments listed on the Regulated Market (RM) and the Multilateral Trading System (MTS) of RON 95.6 million. It is a new record set on BVB for this liquidity indicator, where the increase was 11% compared to 2021.

The investors achieved a new record in 2022 in terms of the number of transactions in all types of financial instruments carried out in all markets: more than 1.67 million transactions. Compared to 2021, when 1.53 million transactions were made cumulatively on RM and MTS, the increase was more than 9%.

All these results were achieved in a difficult regional and international context marked mainly by the war in Ukraine, the increase in monetary policy interest rates, double-digit inflation rates and the persistence of the inflationary phenomenon, the increase in energy prices, as well as the disruption of supply chains supply. These factors affected all international capital markets and, in such a difficult regional and international context, all BVB indices ended 2022 in the red, but with a decline below the level shown by the S&P500 in the US or the STOXX600 in the EU. More precisely, the BET index, which includes the 20 most liquid companies listed on the BVB, recorded a 10.7% drop at the end of last year, to a level of 11,663 points. The BET-TR index, which also takes into account the dividend yield, fell by almost 1.9% and reached 22,686 points. By comparison, the European STOXX600 index fell last year by 12.9%, while the US S&P500 index fell by 19.4%.

In such a context, in 2022, 42 financing rounds were carried out at BVB, more than half of the 2021 record. The total value of last year’s financing rounds reached EUR 1.9 billion, being very close to the maximum in 2021, of EUR 2 billion. In the last 4 years, 149 financing rounds took place at the BVB, which totaled EUR 6.1 billion. Of the 149 rounds, 38 were equity issues and 111 were bond issues.

Also last year, at the end of the 3rd quarter, the number of investors reached over 128,000, a record-high for the Romanian capital market. By comparison, data from the Investor Compensation Fund (FCI) showed that at the end of 2021 there were almost 82,000 investors. This represents a 56% increase in the first 9 months of 2022 compared to the figure at the end of 2021 and a 137% increase compared to the number just four years ago.