The foreign exchange market is gaining in popularity as more exposure of how it works spreads online. It is the world’s most traded market, turning over more than $5 trillion every day and it is openly accessible and relatively easy to start. One of the key attractions of forex is that the market operates 24 hours a day. There isn’t any one centralized place for forex – […]
By Matein Khalid I had published a column in the UK/MENA press arguing that the Uber IPO was “absurdly valued” last week. I was vindicated with a vengeance when Uber priced its IPO at 45, well below the level Saudi Arabia’s uber-sovereign wealth fund PIF invested $3.5 billion in the hose of Travis (now Dara) three years ago. Uber opened on the NYSE with a whimper, not […]
/By Matein Khalid/Are we on the precipice of another spasm of intercontinental contagion in the emerging markets like 2018, or the Asian flu, tequila crisis, Russian rouble default or the Turkish banking crisis in the 1990’s. Yes. The Shanghai Composite Index has plunged 12% and (17% fall for Shenzhen) since Trump got nasty on the tortuous US-China trade dialogue. The IMF cut its global growth forecast to […]
/By Matein Khalid/ Uber Technologies goes public in the most controversial and global tech IPO since Facebook seven years ago. Uber bulls claim that the ride sharing colossus is another embryonic Amazon, a firm that will dominate the digital constellation of the next two decades. I disagree. Uber loses $4 billion per annum and has already been forced to surrender Russia/CIS to Yandex, China to Didi and […]
|By Matein Khalid|The GCC currency pegs to the US dollar have been prominent in international finance in place since the early 1980’s, in times of war and revolution, in times of economic boom and bust, in times of crude oil price surges and crashes. Yet the oil crash of 2014-16 was an inflection point in the economic history of the Arabian Gulf. Crude oil prices were $115 […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| UAE’s integrated steel maker Emirates Steel, nd a subsidiary of the General Holding Corporation (SENAAT), has signed a strategic agreement with Abu Dhabi Marine Services (SAFEEN), a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Ports, which has been valued at AED 1 billion. The agreement, which will be implemented in January 2021 and will extend over the following ten years, is the result of Emirates Steel’s […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| UAE real estate market conditions are likely to remain challenging in 2019, although it could to some extent depend upon how quickly the regulatory changes enacted last year begin to generate additional demand, JLL said in its review of 2018 and outlook for 2019. “While market conditions are likely to remain challenging, investors and occupiers have the opportunity to introduce new strategies to enhance […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had recommended buying the British pound at 1.2700 against the US dollar in successive columns in the past two weeks. Sterling is at 1.3200 as I write, the trade is already hugely profitable. Cable has now closed above its crucial 200 day moving average in a clear trend reversal. As markets dismiss the risk of a no deal Brexit, I believe the pound […]
|By S. K. Basu| Since time immemorial Afghanistan has been a flashpoint of human history in Asia. From the days of the reign of the erstwhile Persian Empire till the time of invasion by Alexander, Afghanistan has continued to see bloody battles that stretched into the Colonial Era and the period the Great Games between British and Russian Empires, World Wars, the infamous Russian occupation to the […]
Ole Hansen With turmoil on every side, gold has re-emerged as a preferred safe haven with further upside. Meanwhile, prospects for a further recovery in oil seem limited by signs of slowing global growth. The direction of commodities in the early part of 2019 will continue to be influenced by decisions taken in Washington and by central banks last year. The economic fallout from US president Donald […]
|By Matein Khalid|If Asia is a growth warrant on the global economy, the omens look awful as the IMF just warned the financial glitterati at Davos. Asian equities were the victims of the grim macro investment themes in 2018. Four Federal Reserve interest rate hikes forced Asian central banks to raise borrowing costs to protect embattled local currencies. The Trump White House’s game of chicken on trade […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Groundbreaking for the UAE’s first tyre manufacturing plant by Chinese tyre company Roadbot was performed at KIZAD, Abu Dhabi’s industrial hub and part of Abu Dhabi Ports. Developed with a total investment of AED 2.2 billion ($614.37 million), the Roadbot factory is being built in KIZAD’s China-UAE Industrial Capacity Cooperation Demonstration Zone in line with international standards and equipped with latest innovative solutions […]
|By Matein Khalid| The epic political dramas of last week (Aunty Theresa’s Brexit plan was rejected by the House of Commons but she managed to survive a no-confidence vote by a narrow margin) strengthened the British pound, exactly as I had expected. Yet sterling has not managed to rise above 1.30 to the US dollar in the past two months and now trades at its lowest levels […]
I have gone gaga on software shares since 2013, when Satya Nadella redefined Microsoft – and tripled the valuation of the Evil Empire of Redmond in the next five years. True, Microsoft was the best Big Tech performer of 2018, an annus horribilis for the best and brightest of Silicon Valley. The world’s most exciting software shares were slammed by the bearish bloodbath on NASDAQ. However, when […]
The Euro has been a disaster since its birth in 1999. Its monetary pathologies led to youth unemployment rates of 50-60% in Greece, Spain and the Italian Mezzogiorno. It gave a trillion-dollar windfall to German exporters at the expense of the hapless Club Med and amplified Berlin’s diktat over the lands once occupied by the Third Reich. It created the milieu for Brexit, the gilets jaunes riots […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The total value of international trade through Dubai’s free trade zones recorded 22 percent jump to US$107.35 billion (Dh394 billion) in the first nine months of 2018, according to a latest report. This represents 41 percent of the emirate’ total trade of the first nine months. Imports amounted to 54.5 percent at Dh215 billion, while exports and re-exports reached 45.5 percent at Dh179 billion. Overall, […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|The Brent crude oil price has fallen to a post-October 2017 low, while WTI now trades at August 2017 levels, according to UBS Energy Review. Economic growth concerns, along with systematic selling – momentum trading and the clearing of futures positions ahead of the end of the year – are robably fueling this latest price decline. That the OPEC+ production cuts only come into […]
|By Raj Samani |As 2018 draws to a close, we should perhaps be grateful that the year has not been entirely dominated by ransomware, although the rise of the GandCrab and SamSam variants show that the threat remains active. Our predictions for 2019 move away from simply providing an assessment on the rise or fall of a particular threat, and instead focus on current rumblings we see […]
|By Matein Khalid| OPEC”s ministerial meeting on December 6 will have a seismic impact on the outlook for global oil markets. OPEC has been unnerved by a 30% fall in crude oil prices in the past two months on expectations of lower oil demand due to a Chinese economic slowdown, spectacular growth in US shale oil supply, King Dollar’s chilling impact on the commodities complex and long […]
|By Saifur Rehman|A 37 percent jump in fuel price has reduced the half-yearly net income of Emirates Group by 53 percent to $296 million in the first half of 2018-19 year, a company statement said. The high fuel cost as well as currency devaluations in India, Brazil, Angola and Iran, wiped out approximately Dh4.6 billion from the group’s profits. Emirates Group, which operates the world’s largest international […]
|By Matein Khalid| The post Lehman decade was defined by the Federal Reserve’s “lender of the last resort” strategy to stabilize the global banking system. The American central bank expanded its balance sheet from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. This led to a collapse in money market rates, Treasury bond yields and asset market volatility. Bull markets are born in panic and die in a frenzy of […]
James M. Dorsey The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and potential Western sanctions against Saudi Arabia has sparked renewed debate about the value of the longstanding alliance between the United States and the kingdom. The debate is not limited to the US or the kingdom, both of which are assessing the reliability of the other even if that is a debate that is waged in Saudi Arabia behind […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Emaar Malls, the shopping malls and retail business majority-owned by Emaar Properties, recorded a growth in net profit of 9 per cent during the first nine months (January to September) of the year to AED 1.639 billion (US$ 446 million), compared to the same period in 2017 at AED 1.507 billion (US$ 410 million). Revenue for the first nine months of the year was […]
|By Matein Khalid| 2018 has been a difficult year for GCC and Dubai real estate. Rents and capital values continued to fall in the third quarter, albeit at different rates in specific segments and micro-markets. The Federal Reserve’s latest monetary tightening at the September 26 FOMC means the six months Emirates Interbank Offered Rate (EIBOR), the bellwether rate for floating rate home mortgages in the UAE is […]
