Vancouver Stock Exchange
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The Vancouver Stock Exchange (VSE) was a stock exchange based in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was the third major stock exchange in Canada, after the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and Montreal Stock Exchange (MSE), and featured many small-cap and exploration stocks.
In 1991, it listed some 2,300 stocks. Some local figures[citation needed] stated that the majority of these stocks were either total failures or frauds. A 1994 report by James Matkin (Vancouver Stock Exchange & Securities Regulation Commission) made reference to "shams, swindles and market manipulations" within the VSE[1]. Regardless of the low opinion several held it in, it had roughly four billion dollars in annual trading in 1991.[2]
On November 29, 1999 the VSE was merged into the Canadian Venture Exchange (CDNX), along with the Alberta Stock Exchange (ASE) and the minor-cap stocks from the Bourse de Montréal (MSE). The trading floor of the old VSE remained as the trading floor of the new CDNX.
The history of the exchange's index provides a standard case example of large errors arising from seemingly innocuous floating point calculations. In January 1982 the index was initialized at 1000 and subsequently updated and truncated to three decimal places on each trade. This was done about 3000 times a day. The accumulated truncations led to an erroneous loss of around 25 points per month. Over the weekend of November 25-28 1983, the error was corrected, raising the value of the index from its Friday closing figure of 524.811 to 1098.892 [3][4].
TORONTO - Shares of Whistler Blackcomb Holdings Inc. (TSX:WB) ticked higher on their first day of trading.
The stock traded for as much as $12.50 in the session after its initial public offering at $12 per share.
The offering raise about $300 million, which was used to acquire a 75 per cent interest in the partnerships that own the Whistler Blackcomb resort in British Columbia from Intrawest ULC.
Intrawest ULC holds approximately 34 per cent of the common shares of the corporation.
U.S. private-equity fund Fortress Investment Group acquired the ski hill when it bought resort operator Intrawest in a leveraged buyout in 2006.
Whistler Blackcomb, about 125 kilometres from Vancouver, was the main alpine skiing venue for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.