As Sharemark celebrates 10 years this week as one of the UK’s leading alternative share-trading platforms, Stockopedia News speak to Gavin Oldham, the CEO of Share Plc (LON:SHRE).
Gavin explains why he founded the market back in 2000, how he sees it developing in the future and why he thinks it is helping businesses and their shareholders today.
Has Sharemark served the shareholders of Share plc well?
Sharemark has served Share Plc (LON:SHRE) and its shareholders immensely well. In the 10 years that Sharemark has been operational, there have been approximately 30,000 trades in Share plc shares – without consideration for market makers – yet in a regulated environment. This has saved shareholders and investors more than £88,000 in bid/offer spread costs. Between 2000 and 2008 when Share plc’s shares became dual traded between AIM and Sharemark, as well as being traded on PLUS, shares traded virtually every week on Sharemark.
Can you explain how the dual-trading facility helps liquidity in Share (LON:SHRE) ?
The Sharemark order book, and its transparency to market makers, disciplines the spread on AIM and PLUS by providing a source of limit orders which can be used to ‘job’ against. Investors also have the opportunity to trade at a single price at the Sharemark auction within the bid/offer spread.
If you were given another chance to design a stock market platform what, if anything, would you do differently taking into account recent market conditions?
If the planned platform was for small to mid cap companies, then I wouldn’t do anything differently. For these companies, there isn’t enough integration of the quote-driven and order-driven markets on the regulated markets. This is where Sharemark can help.
Where do you envisage Sharemark going in the future?
The ability of the market to service a particular interest group is of great importance to Sharemark and the market has already worked with Investbx and the West Midlands regional development agency to provide stock markets that assist companies within the region to gain access to new finance. Sharemark is also working with organisations that want to bring companies in a particular industry or sector to a branded market targeted particularly at those stocks and to the investors which trade in them.
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