Matein Khalid It is ironic that Opec, born as the brainchild of a nationalist Venezuelan oil minister in 1960, could die in 2027 as a result of events in that country. US President Donald Trump’s seizure of leader Nicolás Maduro in a military raid on Caracas and ambition to control 65 billion barrels of a vassal state’s proven oil reserves are triggering a seismic geopolitical realignment with […]
Matein Khalid Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein is set to list in Hong Kong on September 1 at a valuation of up to $27 billion. That is less than half the $64 billion valuation at which Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala invested in 2023. It is a brutal comedown for a retailer once expected to be worth $100 billion. My knowledge of sartorial retailing is admittedly less than encyclopaedic. Yet I […]
Matein Khalid I am so honoured that my peers, who are the creme de la creme of financial journalism in the global and GCC media have nominated me for Gulf Intelligence’s annual Energy Journalist of the year (Middle East) Award. Gulf Intelligence is a Dubai based energy market publisher and think tank, whose research is a must read for even ministers in OPEC and the world’s major […]
Matein Khalid So far, 2026 has been the best of all possible worlds for US money centre bank shares and Wall Street brokers, a Panglossian season of peak profits and blowout capital markets revenue growth. While software, memory and AI infrastructure stocks took a bungee jump on the Nasdaq in July, the major banks benefited from the SpaceX mega IPO, which generated a $500 million fee jackpot for […]
Matein Khalid I feel as if I am no longer skating on thin ice with the AI bubble on Nasdaq but now tiptoeing on a minefield that could well explode at any moment under my feet. Why this premonition of imminent disaster? It is clear that Iran is going to humiliate President Trump and not do any kind of a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz […]
Matein Khalid As Centcom continues its nightly blitz on Iran, the so-called 60-day ceasefire has effectively ended. In truth, the fire never ceased. If Count Tolstoy lived in 2026, his magnum opus might well be renamed… War or Peace? Again. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generals will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz while sanctions relief on Kharg Island oil sales remains a big ask. They know US […]
Matein Khalid The revival of the US-Israel-Iran war is set to intensify the concatenation of economic, energy and geopolitical shocks facing neighbouring Iraq. Before the February 28 onset of the conflict, Iraq was Opec’s second-largest oil producer, with estimated output of 4.3-4.5 million barrels per day. By June, national production had fallen to a paltry 817,000 bpd, comparable to that of minor producers such as Azerbaijan or Oman. This is an […]
Matein Khalid Only after I tried to read the 277-page SpaceX IPO filing did I grasp the truth of Winston Churchill’s observation that his sceptred isle and America were two countries separated by a common language. For my Brit friends and editors, SpaceX is a rocket launch, satellite and AI business. In the legal gobbledygook of SEC/Wall Street, American lingo, SpaceX is history’s first “orbital infrastructure conglomerate”. […]
Matein Khalid US President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to China has done little to end the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz. If anything, Iran appears to have been emboldened enough to escalate Gulf tensions through drone strikes near the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant in Abu Dhabi and rocket attacks targeting sites in Saudi Arabia. Brent crude trading at about $110 a barrel has coincided with a brutal sell-off […]
Matein Khalid The last four years were a succession of black swans that could have easily derailed the bull market on Wall Street but did not though the short term corrections on Nasdaq were both savage in their intensity. These black swans include the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Powell’s U-turn from “inflation is transitory” to the swiftest, most brutal Fed interest rate tightening policy since Paul Volcker, […]
Matein Khalid With SanDisk (SNDK) up 4000%, Western Digital Corp (WDC) up 900% and Micron Technology (MU) up 680% in the past year, I guess every investor who prostrated before the Chip Gods has every reason now to cash out now that memory Xanadu has been attained. The Philly Chip Index 50 day moving average is now 35% below its current level, so this is where strategic […]
Matein Khalid It is significant that Abu Dhabi joined Opec from the moment the emirate exported its first barrel of oil in 1967, four years before the birth of the UAE itself. For 59 years the UAE was a member of Opec enduring an era of multiple shocks, wars, revolutions, recessions, banking crises, oil price wars, supply shocks, embargoes and the pandemic. Saudi Arabia has been the ultimate power […]
Matein Khalid As the world’s leading trading power, China’s vast export engine fuelled a $1.2 trillion current account surplus in 2025. At the same time, it is the largest importer of crude oil globally, with around 40 percent sourced from the Middle East. This exposure gives Beijing a clear stake in Gulf stability – prioritising secure maritime transit through energy chokepoints and uninterrupted access to the GCC’s trillion-dollar development […]
Matein Khalid The US-Israel war with Iran has now stretched beyond five weeks, inflicting extensive damage on energy infrastructure, airports, ports and commercial and technology hubs across the six GCC states. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz to Gulf oil and gas exports is, in itself, an economic catastrophe. It forces the GCC to conclude that energy export security is not national security. Drone and missile attacks triggered a sharp […]
Matein Khalid The past eight weeks have seen a multi-trillion-dollar market cap meltdown. Wall Street developed a sudden aversion to software companies, viewing them as victims of the AI revolution. At the same time, the war in the Gulf has led to a sharp rise in the Volatility Index, the US dollar and US Treasury bond yields. These are macro headwinds for high-beta Nasdaq sectors, including software, and have […]
Matein Khalid The moment Qatar Energy declared force majeure and cut output at Ras Laffan, the largest LNG complex on the planet, once Iranian missiles and drones began raining down on America’s Gulf allies, I knew that the time had come to hedge Strait of Hormuz chokepoint risk with by buying the shares of US LNG colossus Cheniere Energy (LNG) at $220. Yet I was stunned to […]
Matein Khalid The geopolitical convulsion in Iran has led to panic buying in Brent crude as Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery Ras Tanura and Qatar’s LNG mega complex at Ras Laffan shut production even as tanker traffic in the Straits of Hormuz comes to a halt amid soaring war risk, insurance premia, IRGC attacks on oil tankers and a 3X spike in VLCC/LNG freight costs. This is a […]
Matein Khalid Five days of continuous Israeli and US bombing of Iran, the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei and at least five dozen other senior military and political leaders of the Islamic Republic, the de facto closure of tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery and the world’s biggest LNG complex in Qatar, as well as retaliatory drone and missile attacks by Iran on airports, seaports, […]
Matein Khalid Mr. Market is a metaphorical schizophrenic pendulum who swings between extremes of fear and greed, thus giving us a chance to make money at inflection points on both ends of the spectrum. So here we are in a surreal world of extreme fear on Nasdaq where the PEG ratios for Procter & Gamble is 5.4, for Coca Cola is 3.64, Johnny-Johnny is 2.4, Pepsi is […]
Matein Khalid I dedicate this post to my dear friend Abdulla Saeed Al Naboodah who has Ferrari in his spirit, bloodstream as well as in his garages. I went gaga on the Ferrari IPO in 2015 as I viewed the world’s preeminent luxury car maker as unique since it restricted supply to an elite global community rather than peddled product to any joe who could afford a […]
Matein Khalid Something is dangerously wrong in a world where the price of gold rises 30% and silver surges a surreal 65% in a single month, as we witnessed in January 2026. True, an American carrier strike force with a full complement of 80 F-18 Hornet war planes and missile destroyers laden with Tomahawk cruise missiles has sailed from the South China Sea into the Gulf. Once […]
Matein Khalid Zohran Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York City is the worst nightmare for the Big Apple’s commercial landlords, the reason why the shares of SL Green and Vornado have been sandbagged on the NYSE. The last thing a soft Manhattan office market with a plunge in inbound foreign tourism and spike in the 10-year US Treasury yield needed was a 35 year old self […]
Matein Khalid Marriott (MAR) is the world’s preeminent hospitality business with 1.7 million hotel rooms located in 9800 properties in 140 countries. Sadly, its shares were a Cinderella last year, underperforming the S&P 500 index with only a 14% return due to the decline in inbound foreign travel to the US triggered by Trump’s tariff threats, immigration crackdown and restrictive visa rules. Hopefully, Marriott will prove a […]
Matein Khalid The tragic images of the bloodbath in Iran, caused by the regime’s crackdown on protests have horrified the world and amplified the price surge in both oil and precious metal markets, with silver at $95 an ounce and tin up almost 30% in the first two weeks of 2026. Emerging markets will unquestionably be the dominant theme of 2026 now that the macro data suggests […]
