I heard that a shift to “broker anonymity” is being considered by the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). The PSE has been very transparent the past two decades, and it has been doing fine.
Financial markets worldwide have exhibited extremely erratic behavior in the past two weeks. Locally, the stock market posted last Thursday its worst performance since the subprime crisis in 2008. The peso was similarly battered, falling from a high of 40.83 to a dollar to breach the P43:$1 mark (many analysts and economists had predicted the opposite). The local bourse hit its lowest level this year. The benchmark Philippine Stock Exchange index plunged 442.57 points (or 6.75 percent) in just a day last Thursday to 6,114.08. It was the biggest single-day loss since Oct. 27, 2008, when the local price barometer tumbled 12.27 percent just a month after investment banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the world’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s.
Be wary about investing in stocks. Like any other activity where one can lose money, the stock market is not for the faint of heart.
Speaking from the Alpine heights of Davos, Switzerland, President Aquino spun a stupendous tale at the World Economic Forum (WEF) of the dramatic transformation of the Philippines from being the “sick man of Asia” into a dynamic country swimming against the current of global economic downturn in a record time of three years.
We said it over two months ago: With the discovery by the Philippine Stock Exchange of potential price manipulation activities involving the shares of a particular listed company—and the turnover of such information and evidence to the corporate regulator—the ball is now in the court of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
