Bolsas y Mercados Argentinos SA

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What it is

BYMA is Argentina’s main stock exchange: it runs the trading floor where shares and bonds are bought and sold, handles settlement (the mechanics of actually delivering securities and cash), and provides safekeeping and related services for broker-dealers. It also controls Caja de Valores — Argentina’s central securities depository — with a 99.96% stake, making BYMA the vertical owner of almost every link in the chain from trade to custody.

BYMA was born in 2017 from the modernisation of the Buenos Aires Securities Market (MERVAL), folding listing, trading, clearing, settlement, custody and post-trade into a single entity. It was formally incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in Buenos Aires.

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Who owns it

Sixty percent of BYMA’s founding shareholders came from MERVAL — the broker community — and the Bolsa de Comercio de Buenos Aires (BCBA), the traditional stock exchange, holds the remaining 40%. Insiders collectively hold roughly 30.9% of shares outstanding, while institutional investors hold about 4.8%; the free float is around 65%.

No single controlling family or state entity sits above the register; governance is spread across the member brokerages and the BCBA, making BYMA unusual in Latin America as a market-infrastructure company owned by its own participants.

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Who runs it

Gonzalo Merlo is CEO. Agustina Foa Torres was promoted to CFO after a career of more than six years at the company, having previously served as Managing Partner of BYMA Ventures, the exchange’s corporate venture fund that backs technology startups in capital markets.

The board chair is Ernesto Allaria, named in the FY2024 audited accounts filed in March 2025.

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The money, in plain words

Revenue grew 34.8% from FY2024 to FY2025 — ARS 190.5bn (US$130 mn) to ARS 256.8bn (~US$176m) — (our calculation), a real expansion once Argentina’s inflation is set aside. The business kept ARS 172.4bn (~US$118m) as net profit, a net margin of 67.2% (our calculation) — extraordinarily high because running an exchange is mostly software and regulatory overhead, not factories or inventory.

For every peso shareholders have put in, BYMA earns back roughly 26 — a return on equity of 25.5%, strong for any financial company. The P/E of 11.3× looks cheap against those returns, though Argentine-market risk and currency volatility are the discount the price reflects.

There is no debt on the balance sheet as of FY2025; the company sits on ARS 692.9bn (~US$474m) in cash (our calculation), more than the entire year’s revenue. BYMA currently pays no dividend (yield: 0%), reinvesting instead.

One flag worth naming: FY2024 produced a net loss of ARS 32.8bn (~US$22m). That was driven by Argentina’s hyper-inflationary accounting adjustments — a mandatory restatement of monetary assets — rather than a collapse in the underlying business, which was already generating strong operating income that year.

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What it is doing now

In April 2026, BYMA acquired 70% of Quantex, an Argentine fintech specialising in wholesale trading platforms for international fixed-income instruments, at a total company valuation of US$9.5m. The move is part of BYMA’s long-term strategy to strengthen its international positioning and evolve as a capital-market infrastructure provider.

Retail participation is surging: the number of individual investor accounts tracked by Caja de Valores rose from 13 million in December 2024 to more than 17 million by August 2025, a jump of over 30% in eight months. BYMA has also launched BYMA Digital Assets, a platform for tokenised instruments, and debuted BYMA Clearing, its new risk-management and settlement engine.

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What to watch

• MSCI reclassification: A potential upgrade of Argentine equities to Emerging Market status would bring a wave of foreign institutional flows through BYMA’s systems — the exchange is the single most direct beneficiary.
• Inflation accounting: Argentina’s mandatory monetary-restatement rules have swung net profit wildly from year to year (a ARS 229bn (US$157 mn) profit in 2023, a ARS 33bn (US$23 mn) loss in 2024, ARS 172bn (US$118 mn) profit in 2025). Operating income tells a more consistent story and deserves more weight.
• Zero dividend policy: The company carries more cash than its annual revenue, with no debt. Any decision to distribute capital would be a significant event for its yield-sensitive shareholder base.
• Quantex integration: The fixed-income platform gives BYMA a foothold in international bond trading; execution risk and cross-border regulatory complexity are real.

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This is news, not investment advice.