Borsa Italiana S.p.A., based in Milan, is Italy's only stock exchange. It manages and organises domestic market, regulating procedures for admission and listing of companies and intermediaries and supervising disclosures for listed companies. Following exchange privatisation in 1997, the Company was established and became effective since 2 January 1998. It is now a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group plc since 23 June 2007. In 2015, overall capitalisation for listed company on Borsa Italiana was worth €567.2 billion, representing 34.8% of Italian GDP. Borsa Italiana is also informally known as Piazza Affari, after the city square of Milan where its headquarters is located. Borsa Italiana is chaired by Andrea Sironi, and Raffaele Jerusalmi is the CEO. They are both directors of the London Stock Exchange Group. Borsa Italiana is regulated by the Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa, an agency of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, based in Rome.
History
The Borsa di commercio di Milano was established by Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, through decrees dated 16 January and 6 February 1808. It operated under public ownership until 1998, when it was privatized. In 1997, all the Italian stocks were merged. Before of this year other smaller stocks exchanges based in Naples, Turin, Trieste, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Rome, and Palermo. In 1991 the electronic exchanges were approved and in 1994 the market with grida was abolished. In Milan were also the currencies exchange rates fixing and the commodities fixing. On 1 October 2007, Borsa Italiana was merged with the London Stock Exchange in an all-share takeover, thus becoming part of the London Stock Exchange Group. In March 2016, the London Stock Exchange Group announced the agreement to merge in an all-stock deal with Deutsche Borse, but was subsequently blocked by the EU Competition Regulator.
Operations
Borsa Italiana acts as a market management firm operating with autonomy and flexibility. It organises and manages the domestic stock market along with Italian and international brokers through fully electronic trading system. Among its leading tasks, Borsa Italiana supervises listed companies, defining rules for admission and listings and supervising transaction activities.
Trading hours
The exchange has pre-market sessions from 08:00am to 09:00am, normal trading sessions from 09:00am to 05:30pm and post-market sessions from 06:00pm to 08:30pm on all days of the week except Saturdays, Sundays and holidays declared by the Exchange in advance.
Markets
Major trading markets for Borsa Italiana are:
MTA, the leading equity market, which is devoted to mid and large-size companies. It includes two segments: STAR, for mid-sized firms, and MTA International, on which shares from non-Italian issuers already listed on other European markets are traded;
AIM Italia, which collects stocks by small and medium high-growth companies;
