"I've got one order to sell 2,820 shares," said 23-year-old Deki Peldon, the only broker for today's short trading hours in Thimphu, the capital of the tiny Himalayan kingdom.
"It's taken 2 to 3 weeks to find a buyer."
Welcome to the Royal Bhutan stock market, where just four brokers work and which will trade about $3 million shares this year, about what many financiers may deal with in the blink of an eye. The average daily trade in New York is more than 1 billion.
In a Buddhist country where national wealth is measured by Gross National Happiness -- an idea that spiritual and environmental health are just as important as material well-being -- the exchange is crawling slowly along as the country and its $1.3 billion economy tentatively embraces globalisation.
The outside world is coming to Bhutan, slowly. Television arrived here in 1999 and there are now around 10,000 Internet connections in a country of under 700,000 people.
Bhutan still has no traffic lights since the first one was withdrawn after protests from residents that it was unsightly.
HELPING THE GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS
In the stock exchange's bare trading floor, computers sit on sparse wooden desks. There are no TVs on the walls, no shouts into telephones, no empty coffee cups or discarded paper.
Peldon, dressed in traditional Bhutanese dress, typed in her one trade for the day before an 11 am deadline, when buy and sell orders are matched up by computer software that has not been updated since 1993.
Total market capitalisation in 2008 was around $171 million, with 19 listed companies that include cement firms, banks and a newspaper. That compares with the capitalisation of nearly $67 billion for Mcdonalds.
There is no Sensex Index, but compilers of company listings say prices will often not change for three months. Read More...