Hey, who out there remembers MILA, the “Mercado Integrado Latinoamericano” (or ‘Integrated Latin American Market’, if you insist) that was set up in 2011 to connect the stock markets of Chile, Colombia and Peru and give access to stocks of all three markets to all three markets?
Yeah, me neither. So when I came across this report in Colombia’s always decent biznews site dinero.com it was interesting to note just how little it’s being used by its three participants. Chart please!
So what we have here is August 2012’s transactions between the three markets and clearly, the system was used mostly by Peru to invest in Chilean stocks. We also see that Colombians don’t give a flying monkey about Peru or Chile. Also interesting is that of the 560 stocks available in MILA, over $2m of the $2.53m traded via the system was in just two companies, namely Chile’s Entel and Colombia’s Ecopetrol.
Since its inception MILA has seen a mere $25.4m pass its doors, a veritable damp squib of an idea that was fanfared to all and sundry in its oft-delayed creation period. Bottom line: People prefer NYSE.
UPDATE: Kind reader RW writes in to note that “the IKN meter” would have gone well with this post. True RW and what’s more, it still does:
