Floor buzzes at Baghdad stock exchange

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BAGHDAD -- Though barely older than 30, Ahmad Walid al-Said has become the biggest of the hotshots on the noisy floor of the Iraqi Stock Exchange.

As head broker at al-Fawz Co., one of the country's most respected brokerages, and chairman of the Iraqi Association of Securities, he sleeps, drinks and eats the stock market, even when he is not roaming the floor and putting through orders.

'After I finish all this, we go to lunch,' he says after the close of the session. 'During lunch, we talk about what we're going do the next session. We can't talk about anything but the stock market, all day long.'

Welcome to the one place in Iraq where go-getters are abundant and no one is waiting for a handout. Unlike much of the rest of Iraq, the men and a considerable number of women who ply their trade here live by a bootstraps philosophy, eagerly profiting from an equities market where daily trading volume has grown twelvefold since the era of Saddam Hussein.

The stock exchange may be one of postwar Iraq's success stories. It is tiny enough to fit temporarily inside a small, whitewashed building on a Baghdad side street. The trading floor is open only five hours per week, 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays.

Market value or 'capitalization' totals about $1.5 billion, compared with $116 billion for Istanbul's stock exchange, $44 billion for the Tehran Stock Exchange in neighboring Iran, and $3 billion for the exchange in neighboring Jordan, which has a fifth of Iraq's population.

Although trading volume has grown since the previous regime, it totals only about $6 million per day, less than the tiny Palestine Securities Exchange in the West Bank city of Nablus, according to the Web site of the Federation of Euro-Asian Stock Exchanges (www.feas.org).

But the Iraqi government has announced plans to let foreigners get a piece of the stock market, and that has created a stir among 10,000 or so individual and corporate investors who trade here.

The exchange moved to its current location in January, and likely will move to a more spacious high-tech building by year's end, says Jimmy Effem Toma, the exchange manager. Despite her masculine first name, Miss Toma is a no-nonsense woman who dons a bright pink blouse and scours the floor relentlessly during trading hours.

Iraq has had a stock market for decades. Before the war, it was called the Baghdad Stock Exchange, operated by the Ministry of Finance. Now it is a self-regulated organization like the New York Stock Exchange, and owned by the 50 or so member brokerages.

Iraq's equities business always has been a small affair, where brokers, investors, company officials and exchange employees all know each other. That may sound like a recipe for an insider-trading scandal, but it also may be a blessing. Mr. Tabatabai said the stock exchange lacks individual investor safeguards taken for granted in the West. He says they are not needed.

?We in Iraq still maintain a high level of decency,? Mr. Tabatabai said. ?We have never had fraud. We still live by honor.?