By Matein Khalid Every time I noticed a Garuda flight in Jakarta airport, visited the ancient Thai capital of Ayodhya or saw the Ramayana frescos in the royal palace complex in Bangkok or bantered with the Sikh ladies in Singapore’s Changi airport, I was reminded about India’s ancient civilizational links with Southeast Asia. In fact, Vietnamese slang still calls Indians “Klinga”, after the ancient Kalinga kingdom in […]
By Matein Khalid I will never forget watching the 2006 soccer World Cup final in Berlin on TV with my two then nine year old twins, eating pizza and watching our common idol Shakira come out in her belly dancing costume and exchange karate moves on the world stage with her Spanish Harlem (El Barrio) with homeboy partner as she sang “hips don’t lie”. Trust me as […]
By Matein Khalid Speculative manias in the financial markets invariably culminate in hysteria and greed run amok. So the 25% fall in the $2.5 billion Paytm IPO, India’s celebrated fintech could well be a cycle peak for the current zeitgeist, just as the busted IPO of Reliance Power was in the Dalal Street asset bubble of 2007-08. Mr. Marketji is obviously unimpressed by Paytm’s brand name investors […]
By Matein Khalid Brent crude is now down 11% to 73 and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is now down a shocking 13% at 68. President Biden may wish to remember the old Persian proverb “do not wish for anything too badly. You may just get it”. Biden had green lighted a release from the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) last week but oil traders actually bid up […]
By Matein Khalid Von Neumann’s Game Theory can model strategic behaviour in the global oil market, as once Admiral Yamamoto used it to model the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the IDF used it to model Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Nasser’s Egypt in June 1967. So the US strategic reserves release signals the Biden White House’s displeasure with petro-inflation. Biden’s move was priced into the oil […]
By Matein Khalid I remember a time when Lebanon was called “le rêve d’orient” by its Francophile elite. This was definitely the case in the affluent enclaves of Ashrafieh, Beit Mary and Rue Munot where the jeunesse dorée partied with Galic abandon in the mid 1990’s. This was a time of hope for a country still haunted by the nightmare of a civil war that had witnessed […]
Matein Khalid The Middle Kingdom has been a black hole for emerging markets equitywalas since mid-2020. The PBOC kept monetary policy far too tight at a time when the global pandemic necessitated some credit acceleration. The economic slowdown after the Wuhan virus was worse than Street consensus. The property developer Evergrande’s $300 billion debt woes unnerved the Chinese banking system and yuan debt market. The geopolitical rhetoric […]
Matein Khalid Trend is your friend until the trend comes to an end. So this has been a fabulous year to own US equities and I have surfed the Big Board/Nasdaq wave for high stakes with even occasional high octane leverage to bet on the right puppy. I am now paranoid about the risk of a major market selloff in November. After all, as Dr. Henry Kissinger […]
Matein Khalid In the winter of 2018 on the eve of a trip to South Africa with my close friends from Roshni, an enclave of some very special people just outside Johannesburg. I had published an article in the GCC/British media (I used to write for newspapers and magazines then) on software stocks (https://lnkd.in/dTgHd9Wp). My analysis convinced me that MSFT was a superlative buy just below $100. […]
Matein Khalid I have been a consistent bear on the Turkish lira from the time President Erdogan, a political populist and former soccer player, decided that he was a better monetary economist than the four central bank governors in Ankara that he sacked in the past decade. I pleaded with my friends in Dubai/Pakistan not to bottom fish in the Turkish lira during the post coup meltdown […]
Matein Khalid In retrospect, the news that China had banned Bitcoin mining/trading in July and the subsequent sell-off to BTC in the early $30,000s was an ideal opportunity to accumulate the world’s most credible digital currency. Beijing fulmination against crypto is routine and BTC has always recovered from PRC inspired sell-offs. The euphoria now is mainly due to the fact that the SEC has agreed to the […]
Matein Khalid I found this letter from Erin Bali, co-founder of Udemy in 2010, utterly inspirational (thanks ZoPa). It is available on page 96 of the S1 Udemy just filed with the SEC last week for a Nasdaq IPO. S1-page 96: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1607939/000119312521291460/d163445ds1.htm Education has the power to transform the lives of human beings and nothing is more cruel than a country that denies education to its poorest, […]
Matein Khalid My periodic please-all summer asking my friends to accumulate energy stocks on the 77-65 Brent sell off in July has been vindicated with a vengeance this autumn as energy is the best performing sector in both September and October with the XLE now up a stellar 46%, who could have imagined that Oxy would rise from 10 to 35 when Brent was $35, the world […]
Matein Khalid Today is the milestone moment for Manju and I as well as a special constellation of our close friends who shared my conviction that Udemy was destined to morph into the world’s pre-eminent EdTech marketplace. These were the same special friends/investors who entrusted us to invest $17.5 million in a syndicate we led to buy Udemy shares in the pre-IPO market at a valuation of […]
Matein Khalid The history of Wall Street has taught me to be nervous on Mondays in October. This Monday is also crowded with meetings with strategic partners and friends from across the seas and the Gulf. So my market call must be short and sweet. I had given 10 reasons why September augured to be a dodgy month for the US stock market. Despite Friday’s impressive index […]
Matein Khalid Brazil stock market performance unfortunately vindicates General Charles de Gaulle’s morose prediction “Brazil is a country of the future and always will be”. In my Wall Street salad days, we were neurologically programmed to buy Brazilian equities when crude oil/soft commodities price boomed, when the global economic growth was in acceleration mode and when a right wing pro-Uncle Sam President with close ties to the […]
Matein Khalid I had recommended a strategic buy on Airbnb (ABNB) at 137 in July after a 20-point hit as I saw multiple catalysts for a bull run (https://lnkd.in/gEfT4Bwy). Since ABNB opened at 176 on Nasdaq today, I have now decided that I have to milk this cow via leveraged longs/put sales/out of the money calls to an obscene scale and the risk/reward calculus on high valuation […]
Matein Khalid Brent crude has now reached a post-pandemic high of $77 and reinforced my conviction that energy will be the best performing sector of September 2021. Saudi Arabia and Russia have ignored the Biden White House’s call to pump more oil and the quota discipline in OPEC+ is intact while Libyan oil remains offline due to the civil war and the US’s Afghan debacle means Biden […]
Matein Khalid My call to buy the US stock market last night when the Dow was down 850 to 950 points is a money maker for now, as the Dow futures are up 250 points in the pre-market after an incredible 300 point rally in the last hour of trading on the NYSE last night. Faint heart never won fair lady or sold index put spreads at […]
Matein Khalid I came into our latest mini Black Monday with a large net short position in my global equities portfolio and thus feel vindicated, because I had warned my friends on LinkedIn (https://lnkd.in/d6Dy3rEC) to beware a post Labour Day hit on major US equities indices. In fact, I had given 10 reasons why the US stock market was primed to tank and one of these reasons […]
Matein Khalid The sheer scale of the Federal Reserve’s post-Lehman quantitative easing experiment can be gauged by the fact that its balance sheet is now $8.3 trillion or 1/3 the American GDP. In contrast, on the eve of Lehman Brothers failure on 15 Sept 2008, The Fed’s balance sheet was a mere $900 billion. Yet the Bernanke Fed’s revolutionary experiments in monetary policy applied by J. Powell […]
Matein Khalid The civilized world watches in horror as the Taliban flogs women on the streets of Kabul with whips and cable wire, maims arrested journalists with truncheons and reinstates the Ministry of Virtue and Vice. The religious police that carried out executions, amputation, beheading and stoning to death of women that so disgusted the world in 1996 to 2001. It is also no coincidence that Afghan […]
Matein Khalid If 2021 was an annus mirabilis for investors in US equities, Big Tech and REITs (we know who you are!). It was unquestionably an annus horribilis for China, the Big Daddy of emerging market (EM) equities. President Xi’s regulatory assault triggered a 40 to 50% blood bath in Chinese internet stocks (Didi, tera holder dewana. Hare Ram ye dictator ka zamana!) at a time when […]
Matein Khalid The terrorist DNA of the Taliban is proven now that Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord with the blood of thousands of innocent Afghans, NATO soldiers and foreign diplomats on his hands that earned him a place on the FBI’s most wanted list, is the Interior Minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The regime, like the post Napoleonic Bourbon Kings of France, has forgotten nothing and […]
Matein Khalid Any investor who missed 2021’s spectacular rally in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq has really missed out on an incredible money making epoch. The S&P 500 index is up 20%. Google, which I had recommended as a strategic buy at 1715 is up 65% in 2021 alone. The index is up 68% from the March 2020 pandemic lows even as the global economy has been […]
Matein Khalid The Toast (TOST) IPO will be a spectacular winner on Nasdaq when the restaurant software unicorn finally reaches its endgame as a private business. TOST will be the hottest IPO to come out of Bean Town since Boston Chicken or even Amgen. Investors in the Gulf who loaded up on TOST in the pre-IPO market at a $8 billion valuation will, I predict, have a […]
Matein Khalid Freshworks is going to be the mother of all software IPOs on Nasdaq now that it has filed its S1 with the SEC. In fact, the Mommy and Pappy of the new breed of software 2.0 CRM deals incubated is among the hottest puppies I have seen midwifed by the Silicon Valley VC cognoscenti. These include the VC Gods of Mount Olympus – Sand Hill […]
Matein Khalid Imran Khan described the fall of Kabul as liberation, I wonder if he has seen the images of desperate Afghans trying to flee their “liberation” by the odious Taliban – mothers handing over babies over the razor wire, the country’s best and brightest coming back to the airport after the savage suicide bomb attack, which was the Taliban’s modus operandi to slaughter the citizens of […]
Matein Khalid It is time that the government and WHO tell the world that the mutations of the COVID virus will ensure that seven billion human immune systems are vulnerable to the molecular vagaries of its genetic code. In essence, there is no such thing as the end of COVID as we have all assumed after vaccines last November. True, my knowledge of human biology is self […]
By Matein Khalid Mark Twain was so right when he observed that “history does not repeat but it surely rhymes”. In 1992, Soviet vassal President Najibullah was publicly hanged by the Taliban when it seized Kabul in 1996. Shah Shuja, the grandson of the Afghan state’s founder was put on the throne by the East India Company and its Bengal Army but was murdered in 1842 by […]
