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Stock exchange one of Iraq's hottest little success stories

Though barely over 30, Ahmad Walid al-Said has already become the biggest of the hotshots on the noisy floor of the Iraqi Stock Exchange.

As head broker at al-Fawz Company, one of the country's most respected brokerages, and chairman of the Iraqi Association of Securities, he sleeps, drinks and eats the stock market, even when he's not roaming the floor and putting through orders.

'After I finish all this we go to lunch,' he says. 'During lunch we talk about what we're going do the next session. We can't talk about anything but the stock market, all day long.'

Welcome to the one place in Iraq where go-getters are abundant and nobody is waiting for a handout.

Unlike the much of the rest of Iraq, the men - and a considerable number of women - who trade here live by a bootstraps philosophy, eagerly profiting from an equities market where daily trading volume has grown 12-fold since Saddam Hussein's day.

While it may be one of post-war Iraq's few success stories, the exchange is tiny enough to fit inside a small whitewashed building on a Baghdad sidestreet. The trading floor is open only five hours a week, from 10am to 12:30pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Market value is about US$1.5 billion, compared to US$116 billion for Istanbul's stock exchange, US$44 billion for the Tehran Stock Exchange, and US$3 billion for the exchange in neighbouring Jordan, which has a fifth of Iraq's population.

And though trading volume has grown since the regime change, it totals only about US$6 million a day, less than the tiny Palestine Securities Exchange in the West Bank city of Nablus, according to the website of the Federation of Euro-Asian Stock Exchanges.

But the Iraqi government recently announced plans to let foreigners get a piece of the stock market, and that has created a bit of a stir among the 10,000 or so individual and corporate investors who trade here.

The exchange moved to its current location in January, and will likely move to a more spacious high-tech building by year end, says Jimmy Effem Toma, the exchange's manager, a no-nonsense woman who dons a bright pink blouse and scours the floor relentlessly during trading hours.

Some investors sit watching the action from a gallery behind the trading floor.

'It's a hobby of mine,' says Safa al-Ani, a 50-year-old university professor who dabbles in the markets. 'Over the years, I've won more than I've lost but just being here is a pleasure.'

The 87 companies listed on the exchange include some of the hottest names in Iraqi business. There's Baghdad Soda, Hader Marble and Thesar Agriculture. Dar al-Salaam Insurance is trading at 3 dinars (.06 cents) per share, while Basrah Bank is at 5 dinars and the Palestine Hotel - where many journalists live - trades at 95 dinars.

Investors, brokers and exchange officials agree that financial services companies are getting the most play, given a boost by laws that permit foreign companies to buy chunks of Iraqi banks.

Orders come to brokers by telephone or e-mail. But the technology gets decidedly low-tech from there. Each of the 87 companies on the exchange has its own white board. The exchange's 58 employees update bid and ask prices with erasable magic markers.

'We plan to turn it into automatic trading,' says Talib Tabatabai, chairman of the exchange's board of governors, who was educated at Florida State University. 'But this will take time.'

Iraq has had a stock market for decades. Before the war it used to be called the Baghdad Stock Exchange, operated by the Ministry of Finance. Now it's a self-regulating organisation owned by the 50 or so member brokerages.

'We in Iraq still maintain a high level of decency,' says Mr Tabatabai. 'We have never had fraud. We still live by honour.'

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