This Thursday, 7 March, the Technical Advisory Committee of the Ibex 35 (CAT in tits Spanish acronym) will hold its routine meeting. On this occasion, it could include MasMovil in the index. The company’s trade volume is far higher than that of other members of the index. Among them, from less to greater volume, Tecnicas Reunidas, Indra, Viscofan or Meliá. In addition, this time Masmovil does meet the minimum capitalisation criterion. Since the last meeting of the Committee, its floating capital coefficient went from 60% to 80%, which facilitates meeting the minimum capitalisation requirement (0.3% of the average Ibex capitalisation during the control period).
Therefore, although normally changes to the index are normally implemented in the June or December meetings, analysts think that this time there could be changes to the Ibex.
MasMovil is trading in the Continuous Market since July 2017. During the five previous years, the telecom company traded in the Spanish Alternative Market (MAB). The firm became so the first that went from one to another.
What are the CAT’s criteria in taking the decision?
In general terms, the Technical Norms for the Composition and Calculation of the Indices of the Stock Market Company fixes two basic requirements:
• Firstly, the CAT calculates the volume of trading in euros in the market during the control period, which in this case includes the months from September to December inclusively. In addition, it considers different factors to guarantee the quality of that volume. Among others, it analyses aspects like the number of operations contracted or possible changes in the shareholders.
• Secondly, companies can only form part of the Ibex 35 if their average capitalisation exceeds 0.30% of the index´s average capitalisation during the mentioned control period. Above all, the technical norms take into account the floating capital of the different companies and, for this, establish different coefficients to be applied to their average capitalisation in a way that penalises those companies with less floating capital.
