Bolsa Centroamericana de Valores: how it works, who runs it, and what issuers must disclose
What this exchange is
The Bolsa Centroamericana de Valores — Central American Securities Exchange, universally shortened to BCV — opened for business in September 1993 in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Its ISO 10383 market identification code, the unique four-letter tag used by data vendors and settlement systems worldwide, is XBCV.
All securities are priced and settled in the Honduran lempira (HNL), the national currency, whose exchange rate against the US dollar is managed by the Banco Central de Honduras (BCH), Honduras’s central bank.
The exchange provides the physical premises and the electronic systems for members to enter orders and buy and sell securities — instruments that include promissory notes, corporate bonds, government bonds, certificates of deposit, company shares, and a short-term collateralised lending product known locally as a reporto. Be candid about the structure of what trades: corporate bonds issued by banks dominate, government sovereign debt is also channelled through the exchange, and equity — ordinary shares in companies — is a very thin sliver of overall activity.
Even in its early growth years the majority of trading consisted of short-term, fixed-income instruments issued mainly by the private sector.
After the Bolsa Hondureña de Valores, a rival exchange based in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, stopped operating in 2004 in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch and a subsequent financial crisis, the BCV became the sole exchange authorised to operate in Honduras. This is therefore a bond market with a stock-exchange licence: a foreign investor looking for liquid, freely traded company shares will find very little; someone looking to invest in Honduran corporate or sovereign debt instruments will find considerably more.
Who owns it
The BCV is a privately owned commercial company — legally a sociedad anónima, a joint-stock corporation — with 21 shareholders and a paid-in capital of twenty million lempiras (HNL 20,000,000; approximately USD 800,000 at prevailing rates). Its shareholders are the licensed brokerage houses, known as casas de bolsa, that trade on the exchange; the exchange is, in effect, owned by the firms that use it.
The BCV is a private company and does not itself have shares listed for public trading.
The BCV is a founding member of AMERCA — the Asociación de Mercados de Capitales de las Américas, a voluntary alliance of exchanges from Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic — which evolved from an earlier grouping called BOLCEN and was constituted on 8 September 1994. AMERCA’s purpose is to promote cross-border trading and information-sharing among its member exchanges; it does not own any of them.
As of mid-2026, the general manager of the BCV is Edgar Gutiérrez. Not published: the chair of the board of directors (the Consejo de Administración) is not named on the BCV’s public website at bcv.hn/bcv/; the BCV’s by-laws, filed at the CNBS public registry at registrospublicos.cnbs.gob.hn, would be the definitive source for current board membership.
Who regulates it
The BCV operates within the Honduran financial system under the supervision of the CNBS — the Comisión Nacional de Bancos y Seguros, Honduras’s combined banking, insurance and securities regulator. The CNBS was created under Article 245 of the Constitution of Honduras and is an entity operationally separated from any government ministry, with its own functional independence and budget — meaning it can act without requiring approval from the executive branch for day-to-day decisions.
The law that gives the CNBS its authority over securities markets is Legislative Decree No. 8-2001, known as the Ley de Mercado de Valores (the Securities Market Law), published in the official gazette La Gaceta on 9 June 2001 and subsequently amended, most recently by Decree 136-2021.
The Securities Market Law regulates public offerings by issuers, the activities of all market participants, the exchanges themselves, brokerage intermediation by the casas de bolsa, the Registro Público del Mercado de Valores (the public register of all market participants and securities), and the powers of the supervisory authority. The CNBS can force a company to suspend a securities offering, revoke the registration of a broker or an issuer, and impose administrative sanctions.
Public filings — including registration documents for each bond issue and the exchange’s own registration card — are held at the CNBS’s public securities registry, accessible online at registrospublicos.cnbs.gob.hn/MercadoValores. The CNBS’s own regulations page is at cnbs.gob.hn/reglamentos.
What trades there
Within the BCV’s trading floor, issuers authorised by the CNBS and registered at the BCV hold public auctions of their securities — bonds and other debt instruments are sold in a series, announced in advance through widely circulated media, with the CNBS authorisation stated explicitly. The exchange runs a single undivided market; there is no separate junior board or growth-company tier published on the exchange’s website at the time of writing.
The main instrument classes are: corporate bonds (bonos corporativos) issued predominantly by banks and financial institutions; sovereign bonds (bonos soberanos) issued by the Honduran government; and the reporto — a short-term transaction where a security is sold with a contractual agreement to buy it back at a fixed price on a fixed date, essentially a collateralised loan between market participants.
The BCV announced in 2026 a reactivation of its reporto market with a transaction of US$7 million, describing this as an important step in strengthening short-term financing and investment mechanisms in Honduras. Company equity — ordinary shares — does exist in principle under the law but plays a negligible role in actual trading.
Not published: the BCV’s own website at bcv.hn does not publish details of a named share index with stated constituent rules or a rebalancing schedule; the AMERCA indicators page at bcv.hn/amerca/indicadores publishes a sovereign yield curve for the local currency but no equity index composition methodology.
What it takes to list
Under the Securities Market Law (Decree 8-2001), a stock exchange in Honduras must itself be incorporated with a minimum paid-in capital of fifteen million lempiras (HNL 15,000,000; approximately USD 600,000), and its shareholders may only be licensed brokerage houses — reinforcing the members-own-the-exchange structure. Importantly, the inscription of a security on the exchange does not constitute any form of official certification of the quality, solvency of the issuer, or safety of the instrument — caveat emptor applies explicitly in the statute.
Any security offered publicly must first be authorised by the CNBS and inscribed in the Registro Público del Mercado de Valores before it may be traded on the BCV.
Firms wishing to list debt instruments must undergo a formal screening process that includes full public disclosure and a credit rating by a recognised rating agency — a mandatory risk-classification requirement under the Securities Market Law. Not published: the BCV’s listing requirements page (bcv.hn/emisores/requisitos-de-inscripcion) returned a 404 error at the time of research.
The specific minimum capital threshold for an equity issuer, the minimum percentage of shares that must be offered to the public (a free-float minimum), and the minimum operating track record required before listing are governed by CNBS general norms (normas de carácter general) issued under Article 14 of Decree 8-2001; the full text of those norms is available at the CNBS’s securities registry portal but has not been separately published in English.
What companies must tell you
The Securities Market Law requires issuers to meet ongoing disclosure obligations set by the CNBS, including the submission of financial information that the regulator specifies by general norm. Public companies must comply with financial reporting standards and disclosure rules covering ownership structures, management, and financial performance.
Periodic accounts must be independently audited; the law explicitly requires that accounting books and financial statements held by securities investment fund managers be subject to examination and review by external auditors, and the same standard is applied by the CNBS to bond issuers through its supervisory norms. All filings are in Spanish; no English-language version is required or customarily provided.
Not published: neither the BCV’s website nor the CNBS’s issuer-obligations pages published in Spanish specify in a single document the precise calendar deadline — for example, within 90 days of the financial year-end — by which annual accounts must be filed; the applicable deadline is set in CNBS Resolution SPV norms and in each issuer’s registration conditions. The threshold at which a shareholder must make a public disclosure of their holding — what securities lawyers call a major-shareholding notification threshold — is not separately codified in a single publicly accessible English-language rule.
Under Honduras’s anti-money-laundering framework, any person who ultimately owns or controls 25% or more of a legal entity must be identified to the CNBS. Detailed rules on what must be disclosed about board remuneration and related-party transactions are contained in CNBS supervisory circulars rather than in the primary statute, and those circulars are published only in Spanish at cnbs.gob.hn.
How trading works
Brokerage houses record transactions on an electronic communications and data-transmission system that gives all brokers immediate sight of the results of every transaction executed during the day, with transparent procedures ensuring that all buy-and-sell operations are conducted publicly, thus guaranteeing market prices and the legitimacy of operations. Trading in private-sector securities takes the form of public auctions convened by authorised issuers, announced in widely circulated media, with brokerage firms representing interested investors.
Honduras observes Central Standard Time (CST, UTC−6) year-round and does not shift to daylight saving time. Not published: the BCV’s website does not publish the precise opening and closing times of its trading sessions or the number of official trading days per year; the exchange’s internal trading regulations (Reglamento Interno) lodged at the CNBS registry would be the definitive source.
Approximate market hours based on standard regional practice for similar exchanges are 09:00–13:00 CST on business days, but this must be verified directly with a licensed broker.
The auction mechanism means that prices are formed at discrete points during declared auctions rather than through continuous two-way quoting. By law, no president, general manager or senior officer of the exchange may have ownership or management ties to any brokerage house; and the exchange may suspend trading in one or more securities for up to five days if, in its judgement, any circumstance arises that may harm investor interests.
Not published: the BCV’s website does not identify any designated market-maker — a firm paid to stand ready to buy and sell — for any security. Given the auction model, continuous quoting obligations of this kind are not a feature of this market.
How a trade is settled
The BCV has been developing CEHVAL — the Central Hondureña de Valores, Honduras’s central securities depository — which serves as the central record-keeper of ownership and handles clearing and settlement functions for securities traded on the exchange. CEHVAL is the institution that holds the official register of who owns which security after a trade, and through which money and securities are exchanged to finalise a transaction.
Under the Securities Market Law, registered securities may be represented either as electronic book entries (anotaciones en cuenta) or as physical certificates (títulos). In practice, the market moves towards electronic registration, meaning your holding is recorded as a number in CEHVAL’s system rather than as a paper certificate in your hand.
Not published: the BCV’s public website and the CNBS’s publicly available regulations do not state the standard settlement cycle — the number of working days between the trade date and the date on which cash and securities actually change hands (expressed in markets worldwide as T+2 or T+3) — for the Honduran market. The governing rules are contained in CEHVAL’s operational regulations approved by the CNBS, filed at registrospublicos.cnbs.gob.hn.
Whether securities are ultimately held registered in the investor’s own name or in a nominee name (i.e., in the name of the broker or depository on the investor’s behalf) depends on the account structure agreed with the individual brokerage house and CEHVAL’s custodial arrangements; a foreign investor should confirm this directly with any casa de bolsa before trading.
Short selling, lending and margin
There is no evidence on the BCV’s website, in the Securities Market Law (Decree 8-2001), or in the CNBS’s published regulations that short selling — placing a bet that a security’s price will fall by selling securities you do not own — is available to investors in this market. There is similarly no published framework for securities lending, whereby one investor borrows shares from another to facilitate a short position.
The reporto mechanism — a short-term sale with a contractual buy-back agreement — is the closest instrument to a collateralised borrowing product that the exchange operates publicly.
Margin trading — buying securities with money borrowed from a broker — is not described in any publicly available BCV or CNBS document reviewed for this page. The honest answer for this market is that none of the three short-side tools exist in any documented form, and this matters for price behaviour: without short sellers able to push prices down when they believe a security is overvalued, price discovery is weaker and prices can remain elevated relative to fundamentals for extended periods.
Can a foreigner buy here?
Foreign investors are granted the same rights as domestic businesses and may own and operate investments in most sectors, with few restrictions. To invest, a foreigner must open an account with one of the licensed casas de bolsa — brokerage houses registered in the Registro Público del Mercado de Valores — and that broker will then act as agent to place orders and hold securities through CEHVAL.
A Honduran taxpayer identification number (RTN, Registro Tributario Nacional) is required for the account-opening process under anti-money-laundering rules. Honduras’s anti-money-laundering framework is established under the Anti-Money Laundering Law and enforced by the CNBS.
Dividends paid to shareholders — including foreigners — are subject to a 10% withholding tax, which is generally treated as a final tax at the shareholder level. Capital gains from the sale of shares are taxed at a flat rate of 10% on the net gain; for a non-resident seller, a 4% withholding is applied to the gross transaction value at the time of transfer, with a subsequent settlement process to determine the final tax on the net gain.
Honduras has relatively liberal foreign exchange controls: businesses and individuals can convert and transfer foreign currency within regulated limits. There are no Honduran-listed depositary receipts or foreign-listed instruments giving indirect access to BCV-listed securities that this page could identify; a foreign investor must go directly through a local broker.
There is no requirement to register with the central bank before investing, but the account-opening KYC process at the broker is substantive.
What it costs
Not published: the BCV’s website at bcv.hn does not publish a public fee schedule for listing or for annual maintenance fees, either for bond issuers or for equity issuers. The BCV’s internal regulations (Reglamento Interno) — which the CNBS’s own description confirms contains the rules on fees, commissions, trading operations, settlement, and quotation and publication requirements — are the governing document.
That Reglamento Interno is filed at the CNBS registry but is not reproduced in English. Brokerage commissions charged by the casas de bolsa to investors are negotiated individually between broker and client and are not published in a uniform public tariff.
Not published: there is no evidence on the CNBS’s regulations page (cnbs.gob.hn/reglamentos) or the BCV’s legal framework page (bcv.hn/marco-legal/leyes) of a stamp duty or transaction tax levied on securities trades at the time of execution; any applicable tax treatment flows from the general income tax and capital gains rules described in the previous section.
Where the prices are
The BCV’s own website at bcv.hn displays a live price ticker for securities traded on the exchange, making it the most direct source of current and historical price data for this market. The CNBS’s public registry at registrospublicos.cnbs.gob.hn contains the registration documents for each authorised securities emission, including the terms of each bond issue, though not a continuous price feed.
EODHD Historical Data carries BCV securities under the country suffix .HN, making this one of the very few commercial data platforms that distributes end-of-day prices from this exchange to an international audience.
Bloomberg and Refinitiv (LSEG) do not routinely carry live or delayed price data for BCV-listed instruments in their standard international terminal interfaces; coverage, where it exists, is limited to sovereign bonds that also trade in international markets. That near-total absence from the major data terminals is the structural reason why English-language financial journalism and analyst coverage of Honduran-listed companies is so sparse: if a security does not appear on a Bloomberg screen, most international investors and reporters will never encounter it.
The BCV’s news and announcements section at bcv.hn/noticias-2022 provides contemporaneous disclosure of new issues and auction results in Spanish.
Liquidity, as we measure it
No daily price feed exists for this exchange — not from us, and not from the commercial data vendors. We have profiled 6 of the 13 issuers we track, each researched from the exchange's own filings rather than from a data feed. That absence is the reason these pages exist.
Sources
Bolsa Centroamericana de Valores – ¿Qué es la BCV? (bcv.hn): establishes the BCV’s legal form as a sociedad anónima, its 21 shareholders, its paid-in capital of HNL 20,000,000, its governance bodies, and its supervision by the CNBS and authorisation by the BCH. BCV – Reseña Histórica (bcv.hn): the exchange’s own account of its founding in 1993, the collapse of the rival Bolsa Hondureña de Valores in 2004, and the passage of the Securities Market Law (Decree 8-2001). BCV – ¿Cómo opera la BCV? (bcv.hn): describes the electronic trading and auction system, the role of casas de bolsa as intermediaries, and the public-auction procedure for registered securities. BCV – AMERCA (bcv.hn): confirms BCV membership of the AMERCA regional exchange alliance, its founding date of 8 September 1994, and the member exchanges. CNBS – Registro Público del Mercado de Valores (cnbs.gob.hn): the official CNBS public registry for the securities market, containing the BCV’s registration card, the text of the Securities Market Law and its 2021 reform, and the regulations governing the Registro Público (Resolution 009-2021). CNBS – Acerca de la CNBS (cnbs.gob.hn): confirms the CNBS’s constitutional mandate under Article 245 of the Honduran Constitution, its functional independence, and its supervisory scope over the securities market. CNBS – Reglamentos (cnbs.gob.hn): lists the Reglamento del Registro Especial del Mercado de Valores (Resolution 1559/11-12-2008) and other secondary regulations. FOFISA Casa de Bolsa – Marco Legal: a licensed Honduran brokerage house’s summary of the applicable legal framework, confirming Decree 8-2001 as the primary statute and citing the BCV’s own internal regulations as the governing document for commissions and trading procedures. IOTA Finance – MIC code XBCV: ISO 10383 data confirming the exchange’s MIC code as XBCV, country HN, city Tegucigalpa, status active. Chambers Global Practice Guide – Corporate Tax Honduras 2026: establishes the 10% withholding tax on dividends, the 10% capital gains tax on net gains, and the 4% withholding on gross proceeds applied to non-resident sellers.
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