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By any se­ri­ous mea­sure, T&T’s stock mar­ket is in trou­ble. Not cycli­cal trou­ble. Not a short-term cor­rec­tion, but struc­tur­al trou­ble.

Over the last four years, lo­cal eq­ui­ty prices have moved in a down­ward di­rec­tion. Since 2022, the T&T Com­pos­ite In­dex and the All T&T In­dex have record­ed loss­es every sin­gle year. Cu­mu­la­tive­ly, the mar­ket has shed close to 40 per cent of its val­ue. That kind of de­cline is not noise. It is a sig­nal flare.

For­mer chair­man of the T&T Stock Ex­change, Richard Young, has framed the is­sue blunt­ly in a let­ter cir­cu­lat­ed to some list­ed com­pa­nies. This is not un­der­per­for­mance, it is sus­tained de­cline. His warn­ing mat­ters pre­cise­ly be­cause the fa­mil­iar ex­pla­na­tions no longer hold up. Glob­al un­cer­tain­ty, geopol­i­tics, com­mod­i­ty price volatil­i­ty and reg­u­la­to­ry drag are re­al, but they are now per­ma­nent fea­tures of the glob­al econ­o­my.