Suriname Stock Exchange: how it works, who runs it, and what issuers must disclose
– SSX founded 1 January 1994
– Organised by VvES (Vereniging voor de Effectenhandel in Suriname — the Association for Securities Trade in Suriname)
– Currency: Surinamese dollar (SRD)
– Trading: twice monthly, first and third Thursday
– The ISO 10383 MIC PDF references “SSX” in connection with Suriname but I cannot confirm a specific 4-letter XSSX code from the search results without risking error; I will note what is known
– Regulated under the Bank Act 1956 (updated 2010) by the CBvS (Central Bank of Suriname), Waterkant 20, Paramaribo
– Wet Kapitaalmarkt (Capital Market Law) adopted 2014
– Dividend withholding tax: 25% (domestic general rate per multiple sources)
– No short selling, no margin trading, no derivatives
– No central clearing/settlement system
– Settlement is informal/bilateral
– Foreign exchange permits required for capital movements
– Bulletins published on exchange website
– Beursindex (SBI) is the main index, calculated by the exchange
What this exchange is
The Suriname Stock Exchange, known by the abbreviation SSX, is the sole stock exchange of Suriname, and was founded on 1 January 1994. It sits in Paramaribo, the capital, and all shares are priced in the Surinamese dollar (SRD), the national currency introduced in 2004 to replace the guilder.
Trading does not happen on a daily basis; the market meets twice a month, on the first and third Thursday. What changes hands is primarily company shares; the exchange also carries a small number of government-linked bonds, including certificates issued by the CBvS (the Central Bank of Suriname) and bonds issued by Staatsolie Suriname NV, the state oil company.
Be candid about the scale: this is one of the smallest and least liquid securities markets in the Americas. The share market is not a sideshow to bonds — it is the main activity — but both segments together represent a very modest slice of national economic life.
A reader who expects the depth or speed of a major exchange will find something quite different: a small, relationship-based marketplace where a handful of established local businesses are traded by appointment twice a month.
Who owns it
The exchange is organised by an association called the Vereniging voor de Effectenhandel in Suriname — in English, the Association for Securities Trade in Suriname — abbreviated VvES. An association (vereniging) under Dutch-derived Surinamese law is a non-profit membership body, not a public company; it has never converted itself into a listed corporation, and its own membership interests are not traded on the exchange.
The exchange does not belong to any regional or international exchange group. Not published: the exchange’s own website at surinamestockexchange.com, which operates entirely in Dutch, does not publish the names of its current chairman, board members, or chief executive; the VvES constitution and membership list are not available in English or in any public document found during research.
Who regulates it
Under the Bank Act 1956 (updated as State Bulletin 173 of 2010), the Central Bank of Suriname — the CBvS, at Waterkant 20, Paramaribo — is responsible for the supervision of stock exchanges and securities firms, alongside banks, insurers and pension funds. The CBvS can require regulated entities to maintain adequate capital, report suspicious transactions, and follow its anti-money-laundering directives.
In 2014, Suriname’s National Assembly passed the Wet Kapitaalmarkt — the Capital Market Law — partly in response to pressure from the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force, the regional body that assesses countries for money-laundering and financial-crime risk. Under that law the stock exchange should formally come under the supervision of the CBvS, but as of 2023 that transfer had not yet been completed.
The CBvS’s English-language supervision pages are at www.cbvs.sr. Public filings by listed companies are not held in a single searchable database; periodic bulletins published by the exchange itself at surinamestockexchange.com/index.php/bulletins/ are the closest equivalent to a public disclosure register.
Not published: neither the CBvS website nor the exchange website hosts a public enforcement register, a list of regulatory sanctions, or a dedicated issuer-obligations page in any language.
What trades there
The exchange runs one market for company shares — there is no separate board for smaller or younger companies, no derivatives market, and no fund-listing segment. Alongside equities, a small number of fixed-income instruments trade on the same platform: these include CBvS Certificaten (short-term certificates issued by the Central Bank) and Staatsolie Obligatie (bonds of Staatsolie, the state oil company).
The main share index is called the Beursindex (literally, the Exchange Index), sometimes referred to by the abbreviation SBI. It is calculated by the VvES itself from the prices struck at each fortnightly session; there is no independent index provider and no published methodology document available in English.
Not published: the exchange website does not describe how companies enter or leave the Beursindex, what weighting method is used, or how often the composition is reviewed.
What it takes to list
The criteria for admission are determined by the board of the exchange and are set out in the exchange’s internal regulations: companies must disclose the size of the share package available for free trade — that is, the portion of shares not locked up by controlling owners — and must provide audited financial statements. These are the two verifiable structural requirements confirmed by published academic and regulatory sources.
Not published: the exchange’s listing-requirements page returns a 404 error as of the date of this research, and no minimum paid-in capital expressed in SRD (or its approximate US-dollar equivalent) is stated in any document publicly available in English. The exchange’s FAQ page at surinamestockexchange.com/index.php/faq/ mentions that listing applications must be submitted to the board, but does not state numerical thresholds for capital, minimum public float percentage, years of trading history, or board composition requirements.
What companies must tell you
Listed companies must disclose audited financial statements as a condition of admission and continued listing. The exchange publishes fortnightly bulletins after each trading session, which record prices struck and typically include summary company announcements; these are in Dutch.
Not published: no rule seen in any public source specifies a filing deadline (for example, within 90 or 120 days of year-end) for annual accounts, or requires half-yearly or quarterly reporting.
A 2014 US State Department assessment noted that there is no requirement for specific accounting standards, nor a universal requirement for auditing, unless specifically mentioned in a company’s own articles of association — meaning the audit obligation flows from listing rules, not from general Surinamese company law. Not published: no public document sets a threshold at which a shareholder must disclose the size of their holding (the equivalent of a major-shareholding disclosure rule); no rule on insider dealing disclosures or required disclosure of directors’ pay has been found on either the exchange or CBvS websites.
How trading works
Trading does not happen daily; sessions are held twice a month, on the first and third Thursday. Each session is conducted using a manual call-over system — a process in which each share is called in turn and buyers and sellers state their prices until a single clearing price is agreed — rather than a continuous electronic order book.
There are no circuit breakers (automatic trading pauses triggered when a price moves too far in one direction), because the manual session format does not lend itself to automated price limits.
With two sessions per month and allowing for public holidays in Suriname, the exchange holds approximately 23 to 24 trading sessions per year. Not published: the exchange’s own website does not state the precise session start time, a formal order-type rulebook, or any price-collar mechanism; a market-maker programme — where a firm is paid to stand ready to buy and sell at quoted prices — does not appear to exist for this market.
How a trade is settled
There is no central clearing and settlement system at the Suriname Stock Exchange. Settlement is handled bilaterally between the broker acting for the buyer and the broker acting for the seller, without a central counterparty standing in the middle to guarantee either side of the trade.
Not published: no official document on the exchange or CBvS website states a formal settlement cycle (the equivalent of T+2 or T+3 — the number of working days after a trade is agreed before cash and shares actually change hands).
Share ownership is recorded in the books of the issuing company itself, not through a centralised electronic securities depository. This means shares are registered in the name of the beneficial owner (or their broker on their behalf), and transfers require paperwork submitted to the company’s own registrar.
There is no equivalent of a dematerialised nominee-holding system of the kind used in larger markets.
Short selling, lending and margin
None of these products exist at the Suriname Stock Exchange. You cannot bet against a share by borrowing and selling it (short selling), there is no organised share-lending market, and no margin facility — meaning you may not trade with borrowed money secured against your existing holdings — has been described in any public source for this exchange.
This is entirely consistent with the exchange’s structure: a manually operated, twice-monthly session market with no electronic order book and no central clearing has neither the infrastructure nor the liquidity base to support these instruments.
The absence of short selling means that when sentiment about a company turns negative, the only mechanism for that view to register in the price is for existing holders to sell — there is no countervailing short interest, no derivatives market, and no mechanism for price discovery between sessions. Prices therefore tend to move in discrete steps at each fortnightly session rather than continuously.
Can a foreigner buy here?
A non-resident must open a brokerage account with one of the licensed brokers operating on the exchange — VSH Investment, for example, has operated as a certified broker on the SSX since November 1997 and accepts both domestic and international clients wishing to buy and sell shares. An authorisation form is required to place orders through a listed company’s own broker-subsidiary.
There is no requirement visible in public sources to register separately with the CBvS as a foreign investor, but standard know-your-customer (identity verification) procedures apply to all new brokerage accounts under Suriname’s anti-money-laundering law.
Dividends paid by Surinamese resident companies are subject to a withholding tax of 25%. There is no separate capital gains tax — no distinction is made between the taxation of capital gains and the taxation of other income, so gains realised by a non-resident individual are in principle subject to Surinamese income tax, though enforcement against non-residents is limited in practice.
A foreign-exchange permit is generally required for the movement of capital, including certain outward remittances — meaning repatriating your proceeds may require prior approval from the CBvS. Suriname has tax treaties with the Netherlands, Indonesia, and (as of July 2024, subject to ratification) Curaçao; these treaties contain provisions to avoid double taxation.
There are no foreign-listed depositary receipts for SSX-listed companies known to this research.
What it costs
Not published: the exchange’s website does not publish a tariff schedule for listing fees (the one-time fee paid to join the market) or annual maintenance fees (the recurring fee to remain listed) in any language. The exchange’s listing-requirements page returned a 404 error during research.
No brokerage commission schedule is publicly posted; individual brokers set their own rates by private agreement with clients.
There is no stamp duty or securities transaction tax levied on share trades in Suriname under any rule found during research. The principal tax cost of investing is the 25% dividend withholding tax described above and, for non-residents, potential income tax on gains — both levied by the Surinamese tax authority (Belastingdienst Suriname), not by the exchange itself.
The Surinamese dollar (SRD) has been subject to significant devaluation in recent years, which is itself a material cost for any foreign investor converting proceeds back to a hard currency.
Where the prices are
The exchange’s own website at surinamestockexchange.com displays the latest session prices for all listed shares and instruments on its homepage, updated after each fortnightly session. The outcome of each trading session is published in an exchange bulletin (in Dutch), which is archived at surinamestockexchange.com/index.php/bulletins/.
These are the primary and most reliable source of closing prices; the data is free but available only in Dutch.
The SSX does appear in the EODHD data vendor’s coverage under the country suffix .SR, and a small number of other data vendors carry end-of-day prices with a delay. However, the exchange is not covered by major real-time terminal services in the way that larger Latin American exchanges are, and English-language financial news coverage of individual SSX-listed companies is almost non-existent.
The exchange’s own website is available only in Dutch, which means that for a reader who cannot navigate Dutch-language documents, the bulletins — the most granular source of trading data — are effectively inaccessible without translation assistance.
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 7 of the 14 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
Suriname Stock Exchange official website (surinamestockexchange.com) — primary source for trading dates, listed instruments, index prices, and published bulletins; site is in Dutch. SSX FAQ page (surinamestockexchange.com/index.php/faq/) — exchange’s own description of listing application procedures. Central Bank of Suriname — Centrale Bank van Suriname (cbvs.sr) — official regulator; source for the Bank Act 1956 supervisory mandate covering stock exchanges and securities firms, and for the anti-money-laundering directive framework. Wikipedia: Suriname Stock Exchange — summary of founding date, VvES structure, the 2014 Capital Market Law, and trading frequency; used for background and cross-checking. Bodeutsch & Franses, “The Stock Exchange of Suriname: Returns, Volatility, Correlations and Weak-form Efficiency,” Erasmus School of Economics / Anton de Kom Universiteit van Suriname, 2014 — academic paper establishing the absence of a central clearing system, the manual trading format, and the admission criteria in the exchange’s 2007 regulations. BATS Consulting — Suriname Tax Rules summary — source for the 25% dividend withholding tax rate and the foreign-exchange permit requirement for capital movements. Assuria NV investor page on the SSX — confirms the first-and-third-Thursday trading schedule and the broker authorisation-form requirement for share transactions.
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