Bolsa de Valores de Caracas: how it works, who runs it, and what issuers must disclose

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The ISO 10383 MIC code for the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas is XCAR. The exchange is incorporated in Venezuela, registered before the First Commercial Registry of the Judicial Circumscription of the Capital District on 21 January 1947. Trading is conducted in Venezuelan bolívar soberano (VES). The BVC has three main sectors operating under two subdivisions (equities and bonds): industrial, service, and financial. The CVV is a corporation whose exclusive object is the provision of deposit, custody, transfer, clearing, and settlement services for publicly offered securities, authorised and supervised by SUNAVAL. All operations are made through the Integrated Electronic Trading System (SIBE), which allows the placement of purchase and sale orders in real time. The IBC (Índice Bursátil de Capitalización) is the main index, listing the largest companies by capitalisation and liquidity. It is a market-capitalisation-weighted index. The exchange is open Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. It operates in the America/Caracas time zone, UTC−04:00, which does not observe daylight saving time. The governing statute is Decreto N° 2.176 con Rango, Valor y Fuerza de Ley de Mercado de Valores, published in Extraordinary Official Gazette N° 6.211 of 30 December 2015. The Reglamento de Inscripción, Negociación y Liquidación de Valores en la Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, C.A. is published in Official Gazette N° 38.947 of 6 June 2008. The Reglamento General de la Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, C.A. is published in Official Gazette N° 39.096 of 12 January 2009. Companies subject to SUNAVAL regulation must present an annual corporate governance report within three months of the close of their financial year. Listed securities are settled through the clearing house, Caja Venezolana de Valores (CVV), with brokers previously authorised to act in such capacity. On 6 May 1976, the assembly of shareholders changed the name to Bolsa de Valores de Caracas C.A., with a new operating structure of 43 shareholders (puestos de bolsa), increased to 63 members in 1995. It is a member of the Executive Committee of the Latin American Federation of Stock Markets (FIAB). For US persons, sanctions compliance is an additional layer, as shares of government-affiliated companies may be prohibited.

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What this exchange is

The Bolsa de Valores de Caracas — the Caracas Stock Exchange, universally known as the BVC — sits in Edificio Atrium, Calle Sorocaima, in the El Rosal financial district of Caracas, Venezuela. It carries the ISO 10383 market identifier code XCAR, and all shares are priced in the Venezuelan bolívar soberano (VES), the current legal form of Venezuela’s national currency.

The exchange was formally incorporated on 21 January 1947 and opened its first trading session on 21 April of that year, with 18 share trades and 6 government-bond trades at the close of that inaugural day. What trades there today is a compact menu: company shares (called renta variable, or variable-return securities), corporate and government bonds (renta fija, or fixed-return securities), short-term company IOUs known as papeles comerciales (commercial paper), and asset-backed participation certificates called títulos de participación issued through titularisation vehicles.

Be candid about scale: this is a small, lightly traded market in a country that has experienced severe economic contraction, hyperinflation, and international sanctions. Equity trading is a sideshow to debt and money-market instruments in terms of daily value; the equity list is thin and concentrated in banks, beverages, and a handful of industrial companies.

A foreigner examining the BVC should understand they are looking at a functioning legal marketplace that carries real systemic and currency risks — not an emerging market that merely needs discovery.

Who owns it

The Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, C.A. is a private company limited by shares (a compañía anónima under Venezuelan commercial law). When the exchange was reorganised in 1974 and again renamed in 1976, it adopted a shareholder structure of 43 licensed broker-dealer seats (called puestos de bolsa), later expanded to 63 members by 1995; ownership therefore rests with its licensed broker-dealer members rather than with a public float or a single state entity.

The exchange’s own shares (ticker symbol BVCC on its own platform) are listed and traded on the BVC itself. The BVC is a member of the Executive Committee of FIAB, the Federación Iberoamericana de Bolsas — the Ibero-American Federation of Stock Exchanges — giving it a regional institutional voice but no regional group ownership.

As of December 2024, the president (chief executive) of the BVC is Horacio Velutini, named publicly in exchange news releases; the names of individual board members beyond the president are not separately published on the BVC’s public-facing website as of the date of this page.

Who regulates it

The supervisory authority is SUNAVAL — the Superintendencia Nacional de Valores, Venezuela’s national securities superintendent — an agency attached to the Ministry of Economy and Finance for administrative purposes only, with its own legal personality and independent budget. Its mandate is set out in Decreto N° 2.176 con Rango, Valor y Fuerza de Ley de Mercado de Valores (the Securities Market Law by presidential decree), published in Extraordinary Official Gazette N° 6.211 of 30 December 2015, which replaced and updated the prior 2010 statute.

SUNAVAL can authorise or revoke an exchange’s operating licence, suspend trading, intervene a broker-dealer, impose fines, and require any public issuer to restate or supplement its disclosures.

What SUNAVAL cannot easily do in practice — given Venezuela’s broader economic and institutional constraints — is enforce foreign-currency repatriation rules or compel a listed company to produce audited accounts on time if that company simply does not have qualified auditors available. Public filings required of listed companies are submitted to SUNAVAL at Avenida Francisco Solano López, Caracas 1050, and are also meant to appear on the BVC’s own website (bolsadecaracas.com), though the completeness and timeliness of those filings varies considerably by issuer.

SUNAVAL’s own regulatory texts are published at sunaval.gob.ve/leyes and sunaval.gob.ve/reglamentos.

What trades there

The BVC runs two main subdivisions: an equity market (renta variable) and a fixed-income and money-market segment (renta fija). Within those, it classifies listed companies across three sectors — industrial, service, and financial — with no formal separate tier for smaller or younger companies published on the exchange’s public pages as of this writing.

The market also lists short-term company paper (papeles comerciales, typically maturing in under a year) and titularisation instruments (asset-backed participation certificates) issued by specialist titularisation vehicles such as Arca Sociedad Titularizadora.

The benchmark equity index is the IBC — Índice Bursátil de Capitalización, commonly called the Índice Bursátil Caracas — a market-capitalisation-weighted index calculated and published by the BVC itself, updated every 15 seconds during trading hours. The IBC uses the share price, each stock’s weighting, and its market capitalisation as its three parameters; as of the Baker McKenzie Cross-Border Listings Guide (updated 1 February 2026), 14 listed securities are used to calculate the index.

The BVC also publishes three sub-indices — Industrial, Financial, and a separate BVCC index tracking the exchange’s own share — visible on its market-summary page. There is no published formal schedule for periodic reconstitution of the IBC; composition changes when issuers are admitted, suspended, or delisted.

What it takes to list

The principal listing rulebook is the Reglamento de Inscripción, Negociación y Liquidación de Valores en la Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, C.A., published in Official Gazette N° 38.947 of 6 June 2008, and the companion Reglamento General de la Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, C.A., published in Official Gazette N° 39.096 of 12 January 2009, both available on the SUNAVAL website. Both pre-date Venezuela’s severe hyperinflationary episodes, meaning any bolívar-denominated capital thresholds they contain have been rendered economically trivial by currency reform and are no longer operationally meaningful in dollar terms.

Not published: the bolsadecaracas.com listing-requirements page was not accessible as a standalone document on the exchange’s public website at the time of writing, and the BVC did not publish an English-language prospectus-standards or eligibility-conditions summary. The 2008 and 2009 reglamentos name SUNAVAL authorisation as the gateway condition: a company wishing to make a public offer of shares must first register with SUNAVAL under the Securities Market Law (Decree 2.176 of 2015), obtain regulatory authorisation, and only then apply to the BVC for listing.

A foreign company may also list if SUNAVAL approves and the Ministry of Finance provides a binding opinion. Beyond regulatory authorisation, the reglamentos require that a company be incorporated under Venezuelan or foreign law, that its shares be freely transferable, and that it appoint a registered transfer agent — but specific minimum share-capital thresholds, minimum public-float percentages, and minimum shareholder-count requirements in current bolívar amounts (and their US-dollar equivalents) are not separately stated in an accessible English-language form on either the BVC or SUNAVAL public websites as of this page’s date.

What companies must tell you

Under the Securities Market Law (Decree 2.176/2015) and SUNAVAL’s corporate-governance rules (Providencia N° relativa a las Normas de Buen Gobierno Corporativo del Mercado de Valores, Gaceta Oficial N° 42.171 of 19 July 2021), every company regulated by SUNAVAL must file an annual corporate-governance report within three months of the close of its financial year. Listed companies must also publish audited annual financial statements and are expected to file quarterly unaudited interim accounts; the BVC’s investor-relations page lists three reporting streams — audited annual accounts, unaudited quarterly reports, and monthly data — though in practice the depth and punctuality of filings varies sharply by company.

All required filings are in Spanish only; no English filing obligation exists.

The Securities Market Law requires listed companies to publish any material fact (hecho de importancia — a price-sensitive development such as a capital increase, a merger, a change of control, or a significant legal action) promptly on the BVC’s news system, and the BVC website does carry a rolling feed of such notices. Not published: the specific shareholding threshold at which a new significant owner must disclose their stake — what markets call a major-shareholding disclosure trigger — is not set out in a clearly accessible standalone rule on either the SUNAVAL or BVC public websites; the Securities Market Law provides for disclosure obligations in general terms but the precise percentage trigger and filing deadline are not visibly consolidated in English-accessible form.

Similarly, specific rules on the mandatory disclosure of related-party transactions (deals between the company and its directors or controlling shareholders) and on the itemised publication of board and executive remuneration are established in principle under the 2021 governance rules but not summarised in English anywhere on the primary regulatory sites.

How trading works

The market is open Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm local time — Venezuela Time, which is UTC−04:00 year-round, with no daylight saving adjustment. That gives the session roughly four hours per day, or approximately 240 trading days in a typical year after public holidays.

All trading runs through the SIBE — the Sistema Integrado Bursátil Electrónico, the exchange’s integrated electronic trading system — which matches buy and sell orders continuously throughout the session rather than in set auction blocks, meaning prices move in real time as orders arrive.

Brokers (called casas de bolsa, licensed broker-dealer houses) must follow a best-execution principle that weighs price, volume, and likelihood of completion when routing client orders. Not published: specific details of the order types accepted by SIBE (limit, market, stop), the exact circuit-breaker rules that would halt trading in an individual share if its price moved beyond a set percentage in a session, and whether any firms are formally designated to act as market-makers standing ready to buy and sell in less-liquid stocks — none of these are set out in an English-accessible public document on bolsadecaracas.com or sunaval.gob.ve as of the date of this page.

How a trade is settled

The central counterparty and securities depository for all BVC-listed securities is the CVV — the Caja Venezolana de Valores, S.A., Venezuela’s central securities depository and clearing house, established by the Ley de Caja de Valores (Official Gazette N° 36.020 of 13 August 1996) and supervised by SUNAVAL. The CVV matches trades, holds securities in book-entry form on behalf of its participant broker-dealers, and manages cash settlement.

Its website is cajavenezolana.com.

Not published: the current standard settlement cycle — the number of business days between trade date and the actual exchange of securities and cash, known as the settlement period — is not definitively stated in an English-accessible document on either the BVC or CVV public websites as of this writing. The BVC’s own historical pages note that the cycle was shortened from five to three business days in the early 2000s as part of modernisation, suggesting a T+3 convention (three working days after the trade date); however, the current operative rulebook (Official Gazette N° 38.947, 2008) and CVV operational documents in Spanish should be consulted to confirm whether any further shortening to T+2 has since been adopted.

Securities are held in the CVV in book-entry form under your broker’s account — meaning ownership is recorded electronically and not evidenced by paper certificates — with the broker holding on your behalf rather than in your own direct name at the depository.

Short selling, lending and margin

Short selling — betting that a share’s price will fall by borrowing and selling shares you do not own — is not a functioning feature of the BVC equity market. There is no publicly documented securities-lending programme through which a broker or institution could borrow shares to facilitate a short position, and the thinness of most order books makes a meaningful short position practically impossible in any case.

Margin lending — borrowing money from your broker to buy more shares than your cash allows — is addressed in principle by SUNAVAL Circular DSNV/CJ/00004, which sets out guidelines for margin-indexed loans and financing by broker-dealers, including ranges for minimum net worth and guarantees. In practice, margin lending on BVC equities is not a standard retail product, and the structural instability of the bolívar makes it a rarely used instrument.

Derivatives — futures, options, or other contracts whose value derives from the BVC index or individual stocks — do not trade on the BVC; there is no derivatives segment and no exchange-traded derivative product referencing Venezuelan equities.

Can a foreigner buy here?

In principle, yes — Venezuela’s Securities Market Law does not prohibit foreign investors from buying listed shares, and SUNAVAL rules permit foreign companies to list subject to Ministry of Finance approval. In practice, the path is narrow.

You must open an account with a SUNAVAL-licensed Venezuelan broker-dealer (casa de bolsa); the broker will require identification documents, and opening a Venezuelan bank account for settlement in bolívares is typically a prerequisite, as all transactions settle in the domestic currency. There is no publicly documented requirement that a foreign individual register separately with SUNAVAL or the Banco Central de Venezuela (the central bank) merely to buy listed equities through a licensed broker, though the broker itself is subject to anti-money-laundering verification obligations under SUNAVAL Providencia N° 209 of 2021.

Tax on dividends paid by Venezuelan companies is subject to Venezuela’s income-tax rules; withholding rates and whether a relevant double-taxation treaty applies depend on the investor’s country of residence, and no English-language summary of the current withholding rate is published on either the BVC or SUNAVAL sites — a Venezuelan tax adviser must be consulted. Repatriation of capital is the most significant practical obstacle: Venezuela has maintained currency controls managed by the Banco Central de Venezuela for most of the period since 2003, and while the regime has been relaxed in recent years, converting bolívar proceeds back into US dollars and transferring them abroad requires navigating the official foreign-exchange system; the rules change and are not documented in English on any primary regulatory site.

US persons face an additional constraint: US government sanctions designations may prohibit dealings with certain Venezuelan government-affiliated entities, and compliance counsel is essential before any investment. No American depositary receipt (ADR) programme currently exists for the handful of BVC-listed companies that have not been nationalised or delisted from US markets.

What it costs

Not published: the BVC’s current schedule of fees for new listings (the initial listing fee), ongoing annual listing maintenance fees, and transaction commissions charged to broker-dealers is not available as a publicly accessible English-language document on bolsadecaracas.com; the SUNAVAL regulations page at sunaval.gob.ve/reglamentos also does not contain a current consolidated tariff. The BVC’s payment instructions visible on its website indicate that listing-related fees are invoiced to companies via transfer to a Banco Mercantil account, but the fee amounts themselves are not listed publicly.

Any company or broker seeking this information must contact the BVC directly at [email protected] or by telephone at +58 212 905 55 11.

Venezuela does levy a financial transactions tax — the Impuesto a las Grandes Transacciones Financieras (IGTF), the large-financial-transactions tax — which applies to certain payments made in foreign currency or crypto assets at rates set by the national government and revised periodically; whether this applies to a specific bolívar-settled equity trade should be confirmed with a local tax adviser, as the IGTF rules focus primarily on non-bolívar transactions. Brokerage commissions are negotiated between client and broker within limits set by SUNAVAL, but those specific limits are not published in English-accessible form on the primary regulatory sites.

Where the prices are

The BVC publishes live prices — with a stated 15-minute delay for the general public and real-time data for registered users — on its own website at bolsadecaracas.com under the Market Watch and market-summary sections. The exchange also publishes a daily trading bulletin (Boletín de Operaciones) for each session, available in Spanish on the site, which lists every trade executed that day including symbol, price in bolívares, volume, and the effective bolívar amount.

Closing prices in bolívares are therefore accessible to any reader willing to use the exchange’s own portal.

Among the major international data vendors, Bloomberg carries the IBC index (ticker IBVC on Bloomberg terminals) and basic data for some BVC-listed equities; CNBC and Trading Economics also quote the index. However, comprehensive, reliably updated individual-company data — earnings, balance-sheet data, dividend history — is very thin in English-language databases, because almost no BVC-listed company files in English or on a foreign exchange.

Yahoo Finance carries the index under the ticker IBC.CR. The EODHD data service uses the .VE suffix for Venezuelan-listed securities.

The scarcity of English-language company-level data is the single biggest structural obstacle for a foreign analyst: it is not a matter of access fees but of the underlying filings simply not existing in any language other than Spanish, and often not existing in complete or timely form even in Spanish.