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Mexico introduces a new exchange -- it does exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, is there a lesson there?

 Many moons ago, with colleagues, we were sitting in the office of the president of CFE to discuss the new energy market.  These guys were all engineers, bright as hell but knew next to nothing about finance, markets and how they operate.  The then government of Pena Nieto had given CFE the mandate to create the electricity market.

The presentation started with the usual introduction, and we quickly move to some important but obvious topics; the market size and what it could do for CFE and its planning.  The first thing we told CFE is that the market's price discovery would give deep insight into local, regional and national power demand trends that are almost better than anything else available.  This was true in Spain and in the US, the second thing we mentioned is that this was a relatively small pricing market with 240,000 daily markets.  The third thing we mentioned is that a large part of the domestic (Mexican) oil and gas market could eventually be repatriated to Mexico, and no longer have to use the US market.

All three positive comments we thought were innocuous, for the regulator (that was CENACE) the price discovery tool would be invaluable when network growth and expansion were being planned, in fact, price discovery would show where the country's energy system had bottlenecks and how and when this issue should be addressed.  CFE didn't believe that price was a good indicator of network demand...OK, what do you say to that, price not being a good indicator of the balance between demand and supply?  They also said that we didn't know how to count that there were not 240,000 daily markets in Mexico.  Unfortunately, the young analyst with us had included his calculation (Mexico wanted its energy market to be for tranches of 15 minutes, and there were 1,500 nodes)  160*1,500.  They didn't understand that each node was a pricing point, they understood what we were saying when giving a simple example but they could not extrapolate.  Then the CEO said, we will need a supercomputer to run that many spot markets when my colleague showed him his laptop that was running a virtual market with 400,000 daily spot market trades.  They simply didn't believe that a market could be run on a laptop (it could actually).  Finally, and this was the last item, CFE was convinced that they bought all their energy (oil & Gas) on the Mexican market.  The CEO didn't know that there is no Mexican energy market.

We walked out of there and the first thing my colleagues said was:  There is no way in hell there will ever be an energy market here.  These guys know nothing about finance, capital market or price.  They are stuck in their engineering world.  Let's not waste our time anymore!

Now in 2018, the government of Mexico decided that there was a need for a new exchange.  The people in charge of this process at the government level had no idea what exchanges do (there are maybe 40 exchanges in the US). The past six years have been a huge waste of time and effort.  Now, everyone has come to the conclusion that those in charge "didn't know that they didn't know" and therefore could not achieve the result that was sought, which was to make the trading of Mexican security cheaper and easier.  Instead, it has killed new issuers and those companies trading on the Mexican stock exchange are heading for the exit.  They didn't understand how exchanges function.

Granted this is a "Fi-Fi" problem for the President,

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