Greece's financial markets will reopen with some limitations to trading, the nation's Finance Ministry said.
Greek traders will be able buy stocks only if they use new money such as funds transferred from abroad, cash-only deposits, or money earned from the future sale of stocks, the Finance Ministry said in a decree on Friday. Foreign investors will be excluded from all restrictions, provided that they were already active in trading before the imposition of capital controls last month.
The Athens Stock Exchange will reopen on Aug. 3, according to a separate email statement from the bourse. That will follow a five-week shutdown, the longest since a stretch of almost six weeks that ended in January 1973.
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Greek stocks had been enjoying a rebound of sorts when trading was suspended on the eve of the June 29 open. The benchmark ASE Index surged 16 percent in the week leading up to the closure, after dropping 18 percent in the previous four.
While no stock has changed hands on the exchange for five weeks, investors haven't been without ways of betting on what will happen when they resume.
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) listed in the U.S., the Global X FTSE Greece 20, has continued to trade, serving as an instrument for pure speculation in the absence of local prices.
That security has fallen in four of the last five weeks and closed on Thursday down 19 percent since the last day the Athens market was open. Daily volume in the ETF has averaged more than 2.2 million shares, almost twice the rate in the month before the closure.
The ETF may not be a perfect predictor of where equities in Greece will end up. When Cairo's exchange was closed for almost two months in 2011 during the Arab Spring uprising, traders used the Market Vectors Egypt Index ETF to speculate on the shares. Its price slipped about 1 percent during the suspension, then plunged 8.1 percent after the exchange reopened.
The Greek ETF had been a popular one in 2015, with investors sending money to it every single week until the shutdown. In total, it gathered $281 million, heading for a record year of inflows. Its market value reached an all-time high of $367 million on June 25.
An ETF tracking Greek equities with listings in France, Germany, and Italy was halted during closure, though investors could still trade it over the counter.
Another indicator for the direction of the market comes from Greek stocks with listings outside of Greece. American depositary receipts of National Bank of Greece SA have tumbled 33 percent in New York from June 26 through Thursday. Bottler Coca-Cola HBC AG, which makes up more than a fifth of the fund and is listed in London, has retreated 6.4 percent through Friday.
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