Jamaica voted top stock exchange for 2018

(CMR) In 2018 the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) took the accolade of being the world's best performing stock exchange! The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) placed the Jamaican flag prominently on the New York Stock Exchange building in the United States yesterday in honor of it's achievements.

It was the second time in four years that the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) was being recognised as the number one performing stock exchange globally, having also achieved the feat in 2015. Total gains over the past five years come to more than 600 per cent — again, the world’s best performance

Managing Director of the JSE, Marlene Street-Forrest discussed the achievement in a Bloomberg interview. In October, an article on reputed business publication Bloomberg’s website, under the headline “Jamaica’s World-Beating 233% Stock Rally Continues Full Steam”, speaks to the island’s spectacular stock market rally as the best of the last five years.

“It is really to do with the economy, you know that we are stable and persons are optimistic about Jamaica. The business people, the consumers, we're optimistic about what is going on in Jamaica and over those couple of years (50). What we have been doing is encouraging Jamaican companies to do better in terms of their corporate governance, training etc. So we have been putting in the hard work for the companies to perform well and it is paying dividends,” Street-Forrest said.

“It (JSE) is growing very rapidly, which is why too we are here in New York, and we were just in Canada because people are curious, people are seeing the results as shown by the index. But more so what is happening is that when you look on how the companies themselves are performing, they are performing well. There is the dividend payout, there is the stock price appreciation so overall we are doing pretty good,” Street-Forrest added.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness took to Twitter today to commend the JSE.

“This is a great achievement for our small island,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness tweeted.

The prime minister also noted that the JSE has performed “exceptionally well over the last year and was voted number #1 stock market in the world in 2018”.