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By Ronald Fink
Global stock markets overall had a truly terrible first six months of the year in terms of market value, according to figures released today by the World Federation of Exchanges. Yet in the largest markets, at least, more companies managed to raise more capital during the period compared with the same period last year.
Exchanges across the globe saw the value of their indexes drop an average of 11.5 percent in US dollar terms in the first half of 2010, the WFE reported.
And things would have been worse were it not for the gains shown in emerging economies and several European exchanges in the NASDAQ OMX family, notably Copenhagen, Iceland, and Stockholm, which also rallied.
That helped mitigate an 18 percent decline in markets in the Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and declines of 9.3 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively, in the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas.
Market highlights for first half-year 2010
This overall performance was echoed, to some degree, by fund-raising efforts, where fresh capital went primarily to small companies via emerging markets and exchanges. Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the mainland Chinese market for smaller companies, led all WFE members with $22.6 billion raised for initial public offerings. That was more than the combined totals for BME Spanish Exchanges, Korea Exchange and London Stock Exchange Group, which placed third through fifth, respectively.
Shanghai Stock Exchange, the second ranking market for IPOs, raised $8.9 billion. TSX Group was second to Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the number of IPOs with 137 new companies listed between January and June 2010.
Yet the number of IPOs and amount of capital raised through them were up elsewhere. While the value of equities listed on the NYSE Euronext (US), for example, was down 10 percent during the first half of the year, the number of IPOs conducted via listings there more than tripled during the period, to 38 from 12 in the same period of 2009. And the amount of capital raised by those deals soared to $6.7 billion from $1.4 billion.
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