Vanguard to trade in Bulgaria, as well

Romanian brokerage firm Vanguard launched a product yesterday that allows trading online on the Sofia Stock Exchange. The minimum amount necessary to open an account is 10,000 RON (2,850 euros), while the trading commissions range between a maximum of 1% for a six-month volume of less than 200,000 RON (about 57,000 euros), and a minimum of 0.6% for a volume that exceeds 800,000 RON (approximately 228,000 euros). “It is inconsequential whether companies trade on the domestic or Bulgarian markets, as the criterion for setting the commission charged depends on the client’s global operations through Vanguard. If a client qualifies, through the trading activity on a certain market, for a specific adjusted commission, it will have that commission charged on all the other markets,” stated Mihaela Baciu, chairman of Vanguard. Vanguard will work with an authorised broker on Bulgaria’s capital market. For the time being, Vanguard will not offer margin trading, instead the company plans to implement this service in the future, once clients start requesting it. Brokers from Vanguard say the stock market in Sofia is as developed as the Bucharest market from an institutional perspective, resulting in regional investors approaching the two South-East European markets in the same manner. Since the beginning of the year the SOFIX index has risen by 14.3% and the stock exchange has a capitalisation of 5.4 billion euros. So far this year the BET index has risen 28% and the stock exchange’s capitalisation tops 24 billion euros.