The fourth birthday of the Neuer Markt, the once-booming stock market that awoke Germans to shares as a form of investment, passed last weekend with only the faintest of celebrations.
Having lost 80 per cent of its value since March 2000, the Neuer Markt, which specialises in innovative, high-technology companies, is seen these days less as a Wunderkind than as a child with much to learn.
Yet the Neuer Markt's slump, and the less precipitous slide of the Dax-30 index of blue-chip stocks, disguises broader trends that suggest Germany's new shareholder culture is strong enough to ride out the storm.
Crucial to these hopes is the willingness of many German companies, and the regulatory authorities, to improve standards of corporate governance and market supervision so that people keep their enthusiasm for shares.
An older generation of Germans, with memories of savings wiped out by war, dictatorship and inflation, would almost certainly have been scared away from the stock market forever, had they suffered losses on the scale of the past 12 months.
But the striking feature of today's depressed market is that, for the most part, ordinary investors are not pulling out. Indeed, the number of Germans owning shares through mutual funds grew by 750,000 in the second half of last year. Even the number of Germans who own shares directly fell only slightly to 6.2 million.
Whereas only 13 per cent of the population held shares in 1996, that figure is now about 20 per cent, according to a survey by Merrill Lynch and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.
Frequent share-trading, aimed at making a quick killing or minimising losses, is less common in Germany than the habit of viewing shares as an investment that will make a good return over the longer term.
That said, recent scandals surrounding some of the Neuer Markt's 340 listed companies have hardly improved public confidence. Profit warnings, allegations of insider trading by management and owners and dubious business models have sapped investors' faith.
Frustration is also growing at the apparent reluctance of some German companies, quoted in the Dax-30 and other indices, to be as transparent about their activities as their international competitors.
For this reason, the future of Germany's shareholder culture rests heavily on the latest efforts of Deutsche Borse, the stock market operator, to clear the air.
Deutsche Borse has already tightened the Neuer Markt's rules so that company managers must make public any share transactions.
From the second quarter of this year Deutsche Borse will require all Dax-listed companies to produce quarterly reports, as is done in the US and elsewhere. Failure to comply could result in expulsion from its index, with a consequent inability to rely on a strong share price for funding acquisitions or investment.
The acid test for this reform may come in the shape of Porsche, the luxury car-maker, which is resisting it on the grounds - often invoked by German companies in the past - that a three-month snapshot of a company can give a misleading picture of its longer-term health.
From June 2002, other changes will be in place. In an effort to make companies more responsive to investors, Deutsche Borse is altering the basis for membership of the Dax-30 and the M-Dax, the second-tier index of 70 companies. A company's weight in these indices will reflect only the capitalisation of one class of shares, which must be in free float.
Companies with a dual structure of common shares, which have voting rights, and preferred shares, which do not, will see their market weight fall significantly if they do not pool their stock. Rather than risk this, two big Dax-30 companies - SAP, the software group, and Metro, the retailer - have begun converting preferred shares into common shares.
Since companies have traditionally used preferred shares as a way of minimising shareholder influence, and since foreign investors generally want to own common shares, the reform is likely to bring German business more closely in line with international best practices.
