Budapest Stock Exchange

Brief history of the Exchange

The Hungarian Stock Exchange, the ancestor of today’s Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE) started its operation on 18 January 1864 in Pest. Although the institution was set up as a stock exchange, four years after its inception it acquired the Grain Hall, the centre of grain trade, becoming the newly created Budapest Stock and Commodity Exchange (BSCE). Following 1889 the stock prices of companies listed on the Budapest Stock Exchange were also published in Vienna, Frankfurt, London and Paris, attesting to the international importance of the BSE. From the1890s Hungarian government bonds were regularly traded on the stock exchanges of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin.

Following World War II, after the nationalisation of the majority of private Hungarian firms, the government officially dissolved the Budapest Stock and Commodity Exchange, and the exchange’s assets became state property.

After the re-establishment, on 21 June, 1990, the BSE re-opened its doors with 41 founding members and one single equity, IBUSZ, the Budapest Stock Exchange.

The open-outcry system of the physical trading floor that characterized the spot market functioned with partial electronic support until 1995. From 1995 until November, 1998 securities trading took place concurrently on the trading floor and in a remote trading system, when the new MultiMarket Trading System (MMTS), based entirely on remote trading was launched. The traditional “battlefield rumble” of the physical trading floor ceased within a year by September 1999, at which time physical trading was entirely replaced by the electronic remote trading platform of the derivatives market.

In April, 2000, after twelve years of operations as an independent legal person, the new BSE Council decided to convert to a business association in order to maintain and strengthen its competitive position.

The year 2004 brought some decisive events in the life of the Exchange. A major restructuring took place in the ownership structure of the BSE, involving the purchase of a majority stake in the Exchange by strong Austrian banks, together with Wiener Börse and Österreichische Kontrollbank AG.

Due to the integration of the activities of the Budapest Stock Exchange and of the Budapest Commodity Exchange, as of 2 November 2005, commodity trading also started on the BSE