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 […]
By Matein Khalid The horrific fall of Kabul to the Taliban is an indictment of both the systemic corruption that plagued the Ashraf Ghani government and the policy incompetence of the Biden White House in a critical stage of the war. In retrospect, the US had no business negotiating with the primitive savages of the Taliban who have never severed their links with Al Qaeda and ISIS […]
Despite the recent softer tone for the US dollar, a deterioration in US/China geopolitics and a rise in the delta/lambda variants of coronavirus, gold has been unable to breakout convincingly above the 1800 an ounce on any safe haven buying binge. The only possible conclusion is that Auric is still traumatized by the Federal Reserve’s signal that it will taper its monetary policy on a time table […]
Airbnb (ABNB) is one of the great investment regrets of my life since I turned down a chance to invest in it a decade ago at a valuation of a mere $1 billion, even though a lady far smarter than me invested $10 million in it and is now a Silicon Valley billionaire from Dubai. ABNB has been a disaster in 2021 since it peaked at 219.94 […]
After an epic fall in 2020-2021 due the coronavirus shock and the subsequent explosion in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to its current $8.2 trillion, the US dollar has made a counter cyclical move to 93 on its trade weighted index (DXY). The catalyst for this move are massive Japanese purchase of long duration US Treasury bonds, Chinese central bank intervention to arrest the rise of the […]
I owe a debt of gratitude to a brilliant, young, Gen-Z Mademoiselle, whose knowledge of the Silicon Valley ecosystem (and tango!) has helped me source and syndicate some of the best VC financed late stage pre-IPO deals ever seen in the Middle East. Prose is way too prosaic to express my admiration for her talent and diligence and I do not want to write her a poem […]
Matein Khalid 2020 was a spectacular year for investing in late stage technology unicorns and I am proud to have led significant investor syndicates from the Gulf for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the e-learning marketplace Udemy and Swedish fintech Klarna Bank. The secondary markets for the world’s most successful, most coveted, fastest growing and most disruptive technology companies have now come of age and offer extraordinary opportunities for […]
By Matein Khalid The brutal correction in NASDAQ last week did not spare such former tech sector darlings as cloud software, semiconductors and social media shares. The Big Daddy of social media is Facebook (symbol FB) and its shares were slammed by $19 on NASDAQ to $262 or $42 below its recent high. Even though Facebook beat the Street’s EPS whisper number, its CFO confessed that member […]
By Matein Khalid My conviction that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the tech unicorn of our lifetimes was vindicated by the spectacular institutional response to its $1 billion Series N offering in August. The round was oversubscribed by the smart money/tech cognoscenti of Silicon Valley by a staggering 10 times, forcing the company to almost double the size of the offering. I am convinced that the company’s Starlink […]
By Matein Khalid While brick and mortar property in Dubai is in a vicious bear market spiral, the COVID pandemic has been a dramatic money making opportunity in the shares of industrial property landlords. I had recommended the shares of Prologis (PLD), the NY listed logistics REIT at $60 on April 15th, 2018 and had it published in my media columns in the GCC and Britain. Prologis […]
By Matein Khalid In the past 18 years, after a series of spectacular and occasionally failed rocket launches, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has emerged as Silicon Valley’s next colossus, a once in a generation business in the same league as an Amazon, a Google or a Microsoft. SpaceX’s current funding round values the company at a pre-money valuation of $42 billion. Yet the cognoscenti of Wall Street and […]
By Matein Khalid The US Dollar Index has fallen almost 6% since its March 2020 highs. This is no surprise given the sheer scale and speed of the Federal Reserve’s response to the pandemic – a $3 trillion rise in the balance sheet, a buying spree in US Treasury, agency, MBS and corporate debt, backstop programs in the corporate credit markets. In addition, Jerome Powell resorted to […]
By Matein Khalid Last week witnessed a feeding frenzy from the crème de la crème of Wall Street’s smart money (and some Dubai’s smart money LOL!) to be part of the private market financing of Reliance Jio, the emerging supernova of India’s digital ecosystem. After having spent $50 billion in building a scalable, state of the art wireless network, Mukesh Ambani realized that he needed strategic investors […]
By Matein Khalid Oscar Wilde once spoke of his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fabled Bosie, as “the love that dare not speak its name”, in Victorian London, when Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper roamed amid the fog and the gaslights! The love that dare not speak its name in my life is, of course, my obsession with foreign exchange markets, a love that mesmerizes […]
By Matein Khalid The US dollar is the traditional safe haven currency during times of geopolitical or financial stress even when the cause of a risk aversion spasm is ultimately American, such as the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Obama’s epic budget battles with the Republicans in 2011 and the Trump White House’s drone hit on Iran’s most revered Revolutionary Guard commander on 3 January 2020. […]
By Matein Khalid I had published an article expressing my shock at the abysmal corporate governance and financial disclosure at NMC Healthcare, the London listed UAE’s largest private operator of healthcare clinics and hospitals. NMC Healthcare shares were at 1816 pence on the LSE when I published my article in the Gulf and UK financial press on 30 December 2019. NMC Healthcare has now plunged to 775 […]
By Matein Khalid Thankfully, I was not in the global markets during the Black Death, the Great Plague and the Spanish flu pandemic but coronavirus cases have now crossed 40,000 infections and this is way beyond a local Wuhan outbreak. Despite the blowout 225,000 US January non-farm payrolls growth data, I am alarmed by the global recession SOS in the capital markets metrics I track. One, the […]
By Matein Khalid My tactical idea last week to recommend buying sterling against the US dollar (cable) at 1.30 for a 1.34 target is 200 pips in the money now that the Bank of England kept the policy rate unchanged at 0.75% despite Governor Carney’s smoke signals. Sterling closed at 1.32 on Friday evening and will be well bid next week – hopefully. I expect Governor Bailey […]
By Matein Khalid NMC Health PLC, the UAE’s leading private operator of medical clinics and hospitals with a footprint in 17 countries was founded by Abu Dhabi based Indian-Udupi businessman B. R. Shetty and listed on the London Stock Exchange. NMC plunged a shocking 45% in five trading sessions after Carson Block of Muddy Waters Capital, one of the world’s preeminent short selling specialist hedge funds, accused […]
By Matein Khalid I had recommended buying the Tadawul ETF iShares MSCI Saudi Arabia (symbol KSA on NYSE) on November 30 to benefit from the post-IPO surge in the price of the Saudi Aramco IPO shares on the Tadawul. This tactical trade was a beauty even before Saudi Aramco shares soared 20% on its Thursday December 12 to peak at 38.7 Saudi riyals (SAR). As I expected, […]
