Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange (DCSX): how it works, who runs it, and what issuers must disclose
The DCSX was established in 2009 in Curaçao and is the only authorised securities exchange in the Dutch Caribbean. Its official launch was on 20 January 2011. Curaçao is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, situated in the Caribbean Sea just off the South American continent. Its ISO 10383 MIC code is DCSX, and it is headquartered in Willemstad. The instruments that trade on the exchange are fixed-income securities (bonds), equity (shares), and alternative instruments such as investment funds. The DCSX also offers a “technical listing” — admission to the official list without active trading. Notable bond issuers include Surinamese state oil company Staatsolie and Curaçao utility provider Aqualectra. The exchange operates as a fully regulated, self-regulatory organisation, licensed by Curaçao’s Minister of Finance and supervised by the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The shareholder structure features one Priority Share A (valued at USD 1) held by the DCSX Foundation for veto rights on key matters, and ordinary B Shares (nominal value USD 40,000 each) held by active members. The Supervisory Board consists of Chairman Raoul A. Behr, Treasurer Alvin Gerald Stacie, and Secretary O. Lawrence Bennett. The Managing Board includes Acting President Bas Horsten, Acting Treasurer Frank Lammers, General Board Member Maria-Liza Zunder-Curiel, and CEO Dirk-Jan de Graaff. The listing rules were prepared pursuant to the authority vested in the exchange under the Stock Exchange Law, 1998. The supervision of the Central Bank comprises, among other things, ensuring transparency and business integrity, the proper administrative organisation and internal control environment, and the adequate functioning of the securities market. The DCSX follows Curaçao law, which is in concordance with Dutch law. Final appeals of disputes are heard and decided at the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. Tradable listings cover bonds, equity, depository receipts, and funds. Technical listings are those where the purpose is not to trade or raise capital, but to be recognised as listed on an exchange. Trading occurs through an electronic Securities Trading System that supports automatic order matching based on price–time priority. The system handles equities, bonds, notes, and closed-end funds in dematerialised form via a central order book. Orders entered by registered brokers include limit, market, good-till-cancelled, and stop orders. Trading hours are Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 16:00 local time, excluding holidays, with settlements on a T+3 cycle. Vidanova Global Custody Foundation acts as the central depository and custodian of the DCSX. The DCSX’s custodial bank is Vidanova Bank N.V., whose majority shareholder (with an equity ownership of more than 80%) is the Vidanova Pension Fund in Curaçao. All investors interested in buying securities on the DCSX need to have a brokerage account at authorised brokers. Since investors are direct clients of approved brokers, the requirements for client acceptance are established by each individual broker. Curaçao does not tax dividends at source. Curaçao does not levy withholding taxes on dividends, interest, royalties, and rentals. The DCSX commission is 0.15% per trade, applied on both buy and sell sides. The exchange charges initial listing fees, payable on application, for each class of securities, and annual listing fees due within seven days of written confirmation. The DCSX was approved as a Partner of the Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA) and as National Numbering Agency for Curaçao on 17 June 2021. In November 2022 the DCSX received its official confirmation from the UK’s HMRC as a recognised exchange under HMRC’s rules. The DCSX is a correspondent member of the World Federation of Exchanges.
What this exchange is
The Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange, universally known as the DCSX, opened for business on 20 January 2011 in Willemstad, Curaçao — a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, sitting just off the northern coast of Venezuela. The exchange was incorporated in 2009, making it the youngest stock exchange in the Caribbean and the only authorised securities exchange in the Dutch Caribbean.
Its ISO 10383 MIC code, the four-letter identifier used by data vendors and clearing systems worldwide, is DCSX.
Securities on the DCSX are priced in Netherlands Antillean guilders (ANG; the guilder is pegged to the US dollar at ANG 1.79 to USD 1.00), though many bond instruments are denominated in US dollars. What actually changes hands is a mix of corporate shares, corporate and government bonds, and investment funds; the DCSX’s own FAQ notes that bonds and funds have historically dominated over equity trading.
Candour is owed here: this is a small, specialist exchange designed explicitly for start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises, not a deep liquid market comparable to a regional hub. Think of it as a regulated showcase and capital-raising venue rather than a high-volume trading floor.
Who owns it
The DCSX operates as a private limited company — a naamloze vennootschap (NV) under Curaçao corporate law — called Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange N.V. Its ownership structure is deliberately layered.
One Priority Share A, valued at USD 1 (approximately USD 1), is held exclusively by the DCSX Foundation, a non-profit body made up of representatives of local financial institutions; this single share carries veto rights over key corporate decisions, functioning as the exchange’s constitutional anchor. Ordinary B Shares, each carrying a nominal value of ANG 71,600 (approximately USD 40,000), are held by active broker-dealer members who have been admitted to the exchange.
The exchange has never been a pure members’ club in the traditional sense; it was structured as a commercial NV from the outset, with the Foundation providing the self-regulatory oversight layer on top. Its own shares are not listed on itself.
The CEO and Managing Director is Dirk-Jan de Graaff, appointed in February 2022; the Acting President of the Managing Board is Bas Horsten; and the Supervisory Board is chaired by Raoul A. Behr.
The DCSX is a correspondent member of the World Federation of Exchanges and joined the Capital Markets Association of the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym AMERCA) in 2020.
Who regulates it
The DCSX is licensed by the Minister of Finance of the Government of Curaçao and supervised day-to-day by the Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten (CBCS) — the central bank and financial regulator for both Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The legal framework is the National Ordinance on the Supervision of Securities Exchange (in Dutch, Landsverordening toezicht effectenbeurzen), commonly called the Stock Exchange Law, 1998, which gives the CBCS its authority to supervise the exchange and its participants.
The CBCS is an associate member of IOSCO, the International Organisation of Securities Commissions — the body that sets global standards for securities regulators.
The CBCS’s supervisory remit covers transparency and business integrity, internal controls, and the adequate functioning of the market. In addition to CBCS oversight, an internal DCSX Supervisory Board monitors management’s adherence to the exchange’s own Rules and Regulations, and a separate Listing Committee approves each new listing.
The CBCS’s public-facing supervisory information is published at centralbank.cw; the exchange’s own public filings, listing announcements, and market news are held at dcsx.cw. Final legal disputes, should they reach the highest level, are heard by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands in The Hague, because Curaçao’s judiciary is integrated with the Dutch legal system.
What trades there
The DCSX runs a single unified market board on which four instrument types may be listed: equity (company shares), fixed income (corporate and government bonds and notes), investment funds (including closed-end funds and ETFs), and depository receipts. Each instrument can appear as either a tradable listing — where investors can actively buy and sell — or a technical listing, where the issuer merely wants official recognition of being listed on a regulated exchange without mandatory active trading.
The technical-listing option is popular with private companies that need to satisfy Dutch Caribbean regulatory substance requirements or meet institutional-investor mandates that require portfolio holdings to be officially listed securities.
The DCSX does not publish a separately named smaller board for early-stage companies; the single board accommodates everyone from start-ups to the Curaçao government. The exchange does not currently operate a dedicated derivatives market.
Not published: a named, regularly calculated main share index — neither the exchange’s own Rules and Regulations pages at dcsx.cw/downloads nor the CBCS pages at centralbank.cw describe a benchmark index akin to those found on larger Latin American exchanges; no index methodology or administrator is named in any published document reviewed for this article.
What it takes to list
Any legal entity, regardless of nationality or industrial sector, may apply for a listing. For a public offering — selling shares openly to the investment public — the issuer must prepare a formal prospectus, engage a DCSX-registered Listing Advisor (a licensed financial, legal, or audit firm that guides the process and vouches for the documentation), and appoint an authorised broker.
For a private placement — selling to a limited circle of investors — an offering circular or Private Placement Memorandum substitutes for the prospectus. All applications are assessed by the DCSX Listing Committee before approval.
Not published: specific numerical thresholds — minimum issued capital, minimum public float as a percentage of shares outstanding, or a minimum operating-history requirement — are not stated in discrete figures on the DCSX listing pages at dcsx.cw/listing or in the exchange’s publicly downloadable Rules and Regulations document. The exchange’s stated philosophy is that it calibrates requirements to the size and nature of each issuer, emphasising disclosure quality over rigid quantitative gates.
Prospective issuers should request the current fee schedule and listing criteria directly from a registered Listing Advisor; the list of approved advisors is published at dcsx.cw.
What companies must tell you
Once listed, an issuer must comply with the DCSX Rules and Regulations on an ongoing basis. Those rules require periodic disclosure of financial performance — including annual financial statements — as well as timely reporting of material transactions, changes in major shareholders, and changes in management or the board of directors.
The language of disclosure at the DCSX is English, which makes it more accessible to international investors than most Latin American exchanges. Financial statements submitted as part of a listing application and ongoing reporting are expected to be audited, consistent with the DCSX’s stated alignment with EU Transparency Directive standards.
Not published: the precise filing deadlines — the number of days after a financial year-end by which audited accounts must be submitted, whether semi-annual unaudited accounts are compulsory, and the exact ownership threshold at which a shareholder must publicly disclose a stake — are not stated in numeric form on the dcsx.cw/downloads Rules and Regulations page or the CBCS supervisory-obligations pages reviewed for this article. The underlying Curaçao statute (the Stock Exchange Law, 1998) and the DCSX Rules and Regulations together govern these obligations, but the exchange advises issuers to work through a Listing Advisor for the operational specifics.
Similarly, no mandatory board-remuneration disclosure rule is stated in English in any publicly available DCSX document; this is a notable gap for any investor assessing governance quality.
How trading works
The market is open Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 16:00 local Curaçao time (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC−4; Curaçao does not observe daylight-saving time). Allowing for roughly twelve public holidays per year — including Dutch and Curaçaoan national holidays — the exchange has approximately 240 to 248 trading days per year.
Trading runs on a continuous electronic order-matching system, the DCSX Securities Trading System, which matches orders automatically on a price–time priority basis: the best-priced order executes first, and among equally priced orders, the earliest entered executes first.
Registered brokers may enter limit orders (buy or sell at a specified price or better), market orders (execute immediately at the best available price), good-till-cancelled orders (which remain active until filled or withdrawn), and stop orders (triggered when a price threshold is reached). Not published: a formal circuit-breaker rule — a defined percentage move that would automatically halt trading in a security — is not described in any publicly available DCSX document reviewed for this article; the exchange’s small size and typically low intraday volume mean that price-volatility halts of the kind common on large exchanges are not part of the published rule set.
No formal market-maker programme — an obligation on a designated firm to continuously post buy and sell prices — is described in the publicly available documentation.
How a trade is settled
Shares and other securities on the DCSX are held in dematerialised form — that is, as electronic records rather than paper certificates — and must be deposited with a DCSX-approved custodian before trading can begin. The central depository and custodian is Vidanova Global Custody Foundation, an entity controlled by Vidanova Bank N.V., which in turn is majority-owned by the Vidanova Pension Fund, Curaçao’s largest pension provider.
Settlement — the moment when money passes from buyer to seller and the record of ownership officially changes — occurs three working days after the trade date, what the market calls T+3 settlement. This is one day slower than the T+2 standard used by most European and major Latin American exchanges, and two days slower than the T+1 standard now used in the United States and Canada.
There is no central counterparty — no independent clearing house that steps between buyer and seller and guarantees the trade if one side defaults. Settlement relies on the custodian bank and broker relationships.
Shares are held through the custodian in nominee or book-entry form on behalf of the ultimate owner; the practical implication is that the custodian’s records, not a national company registry, reflect day-to-day ownership. Investors should confirm with their broker how registered ownership is documented for corporate-action purposes such as dividend payments and voting rights.
Short selling, lending and margin
None of these mechanisms is described in any published DCSX rule or in CBCS supervisory guidance reviewed for this article. Short selling — placing a bet that a share price will fall by borrowing and immediately selling shares you do not own — is not mentioned as a permitted activity.
Securities lending — a formal market in which one institution temporarily transfers shares to another in exchange for collateral and a fee — has no published framework on the DCSX. Margin trading — borrowing money from a broker to buy more securities than your cash alone would allow — is equally absent from the exchange’s published rules.
This is the honest answer for a small emerging-market exchange, and it matters for understanding price behaviour: without short sellers to push prices down when they overshoot, overpriced or illiquid shares may remain elevated longer than fundamentals would justify. Anyone accustomed to the full toolkit of a developed-market exchange should treat the DCSX as a cash-only, long-only venue until the exchange or its regulator publishes rules to the contrary.
Can a foreigner buy here?
A non-resident investor does not need to register separately with the CBCS or the Ministry of Finance simply to buy DCSX-listed securities. The gateway is a brokerage account with one of the brokers authorised by the DCSX; each broker applies its own client-acceptance process, which will typically involve identity verification and source-of-funds documentation consistent with Curaçao’s anti-money-laundering rules (themselves aligned with FATF, the international Financial Action Task Force on financial crime).
The list of authorised brokers is published at dcsx.cw. There is no mandatory Curaçao tax identification number requirement imposed on foreign investors at the exchange level, though individual brokers may require one for their own compliance purposes.
The tax position for a foreign investor is unusually favourable: Curaçao does not levy withholding tax on dividends paid to non-residents, confirmed by the Curaçao Ministry of Finance’s own 2023 Tax Treaty Policy document. There is equally no capital-gains tax withheld at source on share sales.
Investors should, of course, account for any tax obligation in their own country of residence. Curaçao imposes no exchange controls — money may be remitted out of the country freely — consistent with its status as an open international financial centre.
No global depositary receipt (GDR) or American depositary receipt (ADR) programme for DCSX-listed shares has been identified in the reviewed sources; a foreign investor wishing exposure must deal directly through an authorised DCSX broker.
What it costs
The trading commission charged by the exchange is 0.15% of the transaction value, applied to both the buying side and the selling side — so a round trip (buy then sell) costs 0.30% in exchange fees before any broker commission is added. There is no stamp duty or transaction tax on securities trades in Curaçao.
The exchange charges an initial listing fee on application and an annual listing fee thereafter; annual fees are due within seven days of written confirmation of listing. The exchange’s website states that fees vary by security type and asset size, with additional charges possible for enhanced support or third-party due diligence.
Not published: the specific fee schedule with named amounts in ANG or USD — for example, the initial listing fee for an equity issue of a given size, or the annual fee bracket — is not displayed in an open table on the dcsx.cw/listing page reviewed for this article. The page states that the full fee schedule is provided through a registered Listing Advisor.
Prospective issuers or investors seeking fee certainty should contact the DCSX directly at [email protected] or approach any of the Listing Advisors listed on dcsx.cw to obtain the current tariff document.
Where the prices are
The DCSX publishes live market prices — last traded prices and basic security information — on its own platform at dcsx.cw. The exchange became Curaçao’s official National Numbering Agency in June 2021 under the Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA) framework, meaning it issues the ISINs (the 12-character International Securities Identification Numbers used by global data systems) for Curaçao-domiciled securities.
In November 2022 it received official recognition from the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs as a recognised stock exchange, which matters for British investors in UK-regulated funds that must hold securities on recognised exchanges.
The DCSX’s ticker-symbol suffix on the EODHD data platform is .DCSX. Coverage by the major commercial data vendors — Bloomberg, Refinitiv/LSEG Workspace, and FactSet — is limited or absent for many individual securities, which is a principal reason why English-language research on DCSX-listed companies is scarce.
A reader who cannot find a company in a Bloomberg terminal should try the exchange’s own market page at dcsx.cw before concluding that no price data exists; the exchange’s data is the primary and often the only source.
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 5 of the 5 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
DCSX — About page (dcsx.cw/about): establishes the exchange’s founding year (2009), official launch date (20 January 2011), its status as the sole authorised exchange in the Dutch Caribbean, its ANNA/NNA designation (June 2021), its HMRC recognition (November 2022), and names members of the Managing and Supervisory Boards.
DCSX — Listing page (dcsx.cw/listing): sets out the listing process for public offerings and private placements, the role of Listing Advisors, the 0.15% trading commission, fee structure, and the exchange’s self-regulatory and licensed status under the supervision of the CBCS.
DCSX — FAQ page (dcsx.io/faq): confirms instrument types (bonds, equity, funds), the CBCS’s role as direct supervisor, the CBCS’s IOSCO associate-member status, investor account requirements, and investment-fund regulatory treatment under the National Ordinance on the Supervision of Investment Institutions and Administrators.
DCSX — Documents page (dcsx.cw/downloads): the repository for the exchange’s Rules and Regulations, Glossary, and Market Hours and Holidays; confirms these documents exist but does not display all numerical thresholds in open HTML form.
DCSX editorial — Listings Part 2: Local Requirements and International Directives: explains the multi-layer regulatory oversight (DCSX Foundation, CBCS, Listing Committee), references OECD and FATF obligations, and describes ongoing disclosure requirements including periodic financial and governance reporting.
DCSX — New Requirements for Technical Listings: defines the technical-listing category and confirms that all listing rules are prepared under the authority of the Stock Exchange Law, 1998.
Curaçao Ministry of Finance — 2023 Tax Treaty Policy (minfin.cw): the official policy document confirming that Curaçao does not levy withholding tax on dividends at source, establishing the favourable tax treatment for foreign investors in DCSX-listed securities.
Doing Business Dutch Caribbean — Stock Exchange (doingbusinessdutchcaribbean.com): third-party legal guide confirming Vidanova Global Custody Foundation as the central depository and the requirement to engage both a Listing Advisor and an authorised broker.
Wikipedia — Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange: secondary synthesis source used to cross-check MIC code, shareholder structure, custodian bank identity, AMERCA membership, and World Federation of Exchanges correspondent-member status.
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