Guide
How to follow the Algiers Stock Exchange
Prices, dividends, news and both exchange rates, without digging through PDF notices.
Say you hold shares in Saidal, or you are considering one of the banks, or you simply want to know what the market did this week. The information is public, but it is scattered: the exchange publishes prices as individual notices, the regulator publishes company announcements separately, the central bank publishes exchange rates on its own site. Much of it is French-only, and some notices are scanned images rather than text. The large data vendors barely cover Algeria, so the usual shortcuts do not help.
This is a practical guide to following the market properly, and to the handful of local quirks that will otherwise mislead you.
Checking a price, and why nothing moves intraday
The listed universe is small: ten companies plus around fifty bonds and Treasury instruments, organised by compartment. Each security has a price history from its listing date, along with the figures that normally mean reading a prospectus: market capitalisation, shares outstanding, par value and free float.
One thing to understand before interpreting any of it. This is a fixing market. Orders are not matched continuously through the day as they are on Euronext. The exchange gathers orders in a window, then sets a single price for the entire session. A stock's daily close is therefore also its open, its high and its low. When you see several companies "unchanged", it means that session's single clearing price landed where it did before, not that they traded flat for hours. There is no intraday chart to look for, because there is no intraday.
Reading the order book before a session
This is the most useful habit to pick up, and the one most people miss.
Because the exchange collects orders before striking a price, it publishes the pending order book in advance. You can see the imbalance before the price exists: how many shares are offered against how many are bid, how many separate buyers and sellers, and which security dominates the book. Ahead of one recent session the book was 97 per cent weighted to the sell side, six sellers against two buyers, with a single bank accounting for more than half the offers. That tells you where the market is leaning, and closing prices alone will never show it.
Following dividends, gross and net
For most holders of Algerian equities the dividend is the whole point. Yields have recently run between roughly 7 and 8.5 per cent.
Two things decide what you actually receive. First, tax: dividends paid to residents normally carry a 10 per cent withholding taken at source, but companies that listed recently benefit from a five-year exemption, so their dividends arrive gross. Always compare net figures rather than headline ones. Second, the ex-dividend date: on that date the exchange deducts the dividend from the reference price and clears the central order book. The share price falls by roughly the payout, mechanically, with no selling involved. If a stock looks sharply down for no reason, check whether it just went ex-dividend.
Keeping up with announcements
Everything that matters is announced through formal notices from the exchange and the regulator: dividend calendars, general meeting resolutions, new listings, compartment transfers, changes to trading rules.
Read those as summaries rather than raw documents, and pull the dates out into a calendar. A dense dividend-calendar notice reduces to one useful line: thirty-five dinars per share, payment and ex-dividend on 2 August. Upcoming payments, meetings, coupon dates and new listings then sit in one chronological view instead of having to be reconstructed from a stack of PDFs.
Always ask which exchange rate
Every Algerian financial figure needs a currency caveat, because there are two rates.
The official reference rate comes through the Bank of Algeria and is what banks apply to documented transfers, trade operations and card payments. The parallel rate, known locally as the square rate, is the informal street market and usually sits well above it. Recently the euro was near 155 dinars officially and near 278 on the parallel market, a gap of roughly 80 per cent. Keep that in mind when reading any dinar return: an 8 per cent dividend yield is a dinar yield, and which rate you use to think about dinars changes what it means.
What to keep in mind
Prices reflect the most recent session rather than a live quote, because that is how the market works. Parallel exchange rates are indicative: that market is informal and moves by location and by the hour. Dividend and calendar records are compiled by hand from published documents, so an entry can trail an announcement slightly.
Algierex is an independent product with no affiliation to the SGBV or the COSOB, and you cannot place trades through it. For that you still need an intermediary. For anything with money at stake, confirm against the official publication or with your broker.