BME Growth attracts retail investors despite liquidity concerns, says exchange director

The Medcap Forum opened this week at Madrid's stock exchange palace, drawing nearly a hundred small and mid-sized companies to what amounts to the annual gathering of Spain's scrappier public markets. For three days, the event fills the calendar with panel discussions and networking sessions, but the real work happens in the margins—more than a thousand one-on-one meetings between company executives and potential investors, all carefully choreographed by BME Growth, the exchange that serves Spain's smaller listed firms.

Jesús González Nieto, the director of BME Growth, walked through the numbers with the precision of someone who has spent years defending a market that most investors overlook. About a hundred companies would attend this year, he explained, meeting with roughly 150 professional investors—pension funds, collective investment schemes, foreign money managers—plus a handful of international visitors, mostly European. The smaller companies might field three investor requests; the hungrier ones could fill an entire day from nine in the morning until seven at night, with only a lunch break interrupting the parade of back-to-back pitches. In total, the forum would generate around 1,200 meetings.

The persistent knock against BME Growth is liquidity. Institutional investors have long steered clear, citing the difficulty of building meaningful positions in companies with market capitalizations so modest that even a modest exit becomes a negotiation rather than a market transaction. González Nieto bristled at this characterization, though not dismissively. The problem, he suggested, stems from conflating two different things: liquidity and trading volume. Yes, the daily turnover is modest. But that misses the point entirely. Retail investors—ordinary people with five thousand or ten thousand euros to deploy—face no real friction entering or leaving positions. They can buy, they can sell, they can move on. The professionals who do show up understand what they are doing. They are patient capital, he said, and they know the difference between a market that trades constantly and a market where you can actually move meaningful money if you know how to look for it.

Arteche, a company that recently graduated from BME Growth to Spain's main market, illustrated the point. In its early years on the smaller exchange, the stock barely moved—ten thousand euros a day in the best cases. But the company delivered on its promises, then exceeded them, and gradually the investors came. By the time it moved to the larger market, Arteche was trading a million euros daily. The perception of illiquidity, González Nieto argued, was simply wrong. The market had improved markedly. In 2024, BME Growth handled 650 million euros in volume. Last year that rose to 820 million, a 25 percent jump. The first four months of 2026 showed another 10 percent gain, with 220 million euros already traded.

What surprised many observers was the role of retail investors. González Nieto estimated they account for roughly 40 percent of the money moving through BME Growth. Some are speculators, pure and simple. Others are bank customers, steered by advisors at firms like Andbank and Renta 4, who invest with genuine conviction. The smaller exchange has become a haven for a certain kind of investor—one willing to take on the risk of smaller companies in exchange for the possibility of outsized returns.

The broader challenge facing BME Growth is the drought of new listings. Only one company, the Asturian firm TSK, debuted this year. The year before was worse. To change the trajectory, González Nieto outlined two approaches: aggressive outreach to potential issuers, the kind of sustained relationship-building that eventually brought Arteche to market, and technical simplification. BME Easy Access, announced last year, aims to streamline the listing process itself, removing friction from the path to going public. The geopolitical environment has not helped, he acknowledged, but he expected the numbers to improve within months.

The forum's opening panel bore the title "In Search of the Lost Retail Investor," a nod to the generational divide that has long plagued equity markets. Younger people, González Nieto observed, do not believe that leaving money in a savings account is a reasonable option. They are more restless than their parents, more willing to take risk. Yes, some of that appetite flows toward Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, assets that look speculative by traditional standards. But that is not entirely a problem. Better that young people invest in something—even digital assets—than let their money sit idle. The real work is channeling that energy toward productive investments, toward companies that build things and employ people, toward markets like BME Growth that offer genuine opportunity for those willing to look closely enough.