The Bucharest bourse is the most expense in Europe by the trading fees, though BVB decreased the fees in October 2014. The high costs of trading was identified as one of the “eight barriers” in the way of the capital market development.
For a transaction with shares, BVB takes a 0.1% fee of the value, while the purchasing fee sets at 0.04%. Thus, the total fee is 0.14% of the transaction value.
The fees are much lower on the more developed Bourses in Europe. For example, the Bourse in Warsaw takes a fee between 0.01% and 0.033% for transactions with shares, according to the traded volume in one operation, a higher volume having a lower tariff. In Vienna, fees set between 0.02% and 0.04%, according to the liquidity of the traded shares. The Bourse in Frankfurt has the lowest tariffs in the region, below 0.005% of the transaction value.
One of the reasons supporting the high BVB fee is that, due to the low liquidity, it needs to take higher fees to cover the fixed costs (salaries and utilities). But the smaller bourses in CEE survive with lower fees than BVB.
For example, the traded value of Bourse in Budapest is 20% lower than BVB’s, but the transactions are fivefold higher at a fee of only 0.015%, namely tenfold lower than in Bucharest.
Also, the small Bourses in Ljubljana and Sofia, which total less than a half of BVB’s trading values, take fees of 0.075%-0.08% per transactions.
According to brokers, the fees are not the main reasons hindering market growth. Nevertheless, they would prefer the trading fees paid by investors be smaller.
“Fees are a problem but not the biggest. I wouldn’t expect transactions increase over ten times if reducing fees tenfold,“ according to Razvan Pasol, general manager of brokerage company Intercapital Invest.
According to Nicolae Moroianu, executive manager of BT Securities, “If someone really wants to buy merchandise, the fees would not be a problem. An investor decides to sell shares because he either needs money, or he wants to invest somewhere else. Otherwise, why selling? Just because the fees are low? The Bourse needs more goods, more listed companies.“
Even of the bourse cut fees last year, the number of investors or liquidity did not increase. The only effect was the drop of BVB’s operating revenue. BVB reported an operating profit under 1 million lei in the first semester, which is the lowest result since 2009.
Besides BVB fees, an investor also pays 0.06% to the Romania’s financial regulator ASF (only at purchasing), plus the fee to the broker of around 0.5% – 0.8% per transaction (purchasing and sale).
BVB representatives did not make any comments by the time of publishing the news.
(English version by Manuela Panescu)