Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, an interesting look at Myanmar’s nascent stock exchange:

At the Yangon Stock Exchange, or YSX as it’s known, a cable television crew turns up every day to provide a rundown of the day’s trading. On a recent Thursday, their report was, as usual, brief.

The MYANPIX index closed unchanged—for the second day in a row—at 627.42 points on turnover worth just under $47,000. Myanmar Citizens Bank, one of the market’s three listed stocks at the time, didn’t trade at all. A fourth stock was added to the market’s lineup on Friday.

In his office a block away, broker Martin Zhang’s phone rang. He felt a small rush of excitement, thinking it might be a client placing an order. 

Moments later, his hopes sank. “He wanted to know if he should cash out of the market and invest in secondhand cars,” Mr. Zhang said.

U.S. stocks are on a tear, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average brushing up against 20000 points. But trading is drying up in some of the world’s tiniest exchanges, such as those in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, as the rising dollar draws speculators’ interest to black-market currency markets instead.

While traders at the NYSE power through on espresso as the exchange handles trading volumes of more than $100 billion on its busiest days, the booths of securities companies at the YSX are largely deserted, save for a few pens and paper clips. Here in what was once Burma, the market is down 44% since it began trading in March.

Mr. Zhang, dressed in the country’s usual business outfit of white, collarless shirt and dark sarong, spends most of his days gossiping at tea shops or chewing the fat with clients who drop by his office. The rest of the time, Mr. Zhang, 34 years old, makes cold calls to troll for new clients, or works on a Facebook page he set up to educate people about stock trading.

“Sometimes I upload videos explaining how it works and what investors should be looking for in a company. Sometimes I write articles,” Mr. Zhang said. “I just try to get people ready for whenever they want to start investing.”

A recent post: “Hydropower Resources in Myanmar.”

The exchange also has provided a small library for anyone to have a look at. Titles include a biography of Warren Buffett, how-to guides such as “Get Started in Stock Investment and Trading,” and, ominously, James Rickards’ “The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System.” No one was browsing during a recent visit.

It isn’t that people in Myanmar don’t like to trade. Around the back of the Yangon Stock Exchange on a recent day, around 150 people were writing down black-market prices for dollars and barking into cellphones, just beyond a roll of barbed wire and a rusted old Toyota sedan.

With Myanmar’s kyat falling to record lows recently of around 1,380 kyats per dollar—down 16% since the middle of last year—trading was brisk. Vendors nearby sold peanut brittle or cigarettes by the stick from small wooden carts to keep the traders fed and stimulated.

“There’s more and more pressure every day to get a good price because the kyat is falling so quickly,” said one trader, Win Sein, holding his phone to his chest. “Some think it could fall to 1,500 kyats soon.”

Like many of the world’s poorer countries, Myanmar saw having a stock exchange as a status symbol, and a sign that it was finally open for business after the former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi’s election as the country’s leader just over a year ago. 

“We can now proclaim to the world that we are no longer a backward nation,” said Myanmar’s deputy finance minister at the market’s launch.

Mr. Zhang, who became a broker at Yangon’s KBZ Stirling Coleman Securities last year after helping to launch one of the country’s new cellphone networks, said investors scrambled to buy shares in the first company to list, a local conglomerate called First Myanmar Investment, or FMI.

“There were lines going out the door all the way into the street,” said Mr. Zhang. “You wouldn’t even have to ask what they wanted to do. They all wanted to buy. We’d just ask how many.”

He and his colleagues at KBZSC started at 7 a.m. or earlier, often working 12-hour days to register all the people who wanted to trade the new shares.

On the first day, the price of FMI shot up from its opening price of 31,000 kyats to near 41,000 kyats, or about $30 a share, triggering the exchange’s circuit breakers. Company founder Serge Pun celebrated by hugging the brass bell that is rung to signal the opening and close of the day’s trading.

The next company to list was Myanmar Thilawa SEZ Holdings, which operates a big new industrial zone near Yangon. It saw its share price rise from 50,000 kyats to 70,000 kyats over the course of several days.

“It was exciting,” recalled Tun Maung Hlaing, an executive director at the company. “It was like that movie ‘Wall Street.’ You know, ‘Greed is good’.”

It didn’t last. Both shares fell back, FMI to 32,000 kyats, then more than halving to 14,000 kyats, where it has since remained. Shares of a third company, Myanmar Citizens Bank, have barely moved since they began trading in August and attention began to turn to the run up in U.S. stocks. Friday’s debutant, First Private Bank, saw its shares fall 5,000 kyats to 34,000 kyats—its lower limit for the day.

The exchange should survive, since it is a joint venture between Myanmar’s government, Japan Exchange Group and Daiwa Institute of Research. Market manager Min Thu said he was looking forward to potential new legislation that would allow foreigners into the market. Economists hope that institutional investors will join too, perhaps even Myanmar’s army, which already owns breweries, mining companies and other businesses.

For now, the buzz around the exchange centers on new government rules limiting the import of used cars from Japan, which has sent prices for clunkers soaring.

“People are always looking for a story to trade on,” Mr. Zhang said. “But right now it seems to be secondhand cars, not stocks.”