|By Arabian Post Staff| Hedge funds which bet on Saudi riyal’s dollar peg are reported to have lost heavily as the price rebound in the oil has apparently removed all immediate possibilities of Saudi Arabia abandoning the currency’s peg with the dollar. Several US hedge funds are understood to be among the losers. According to Bloomberg, contracts used to speculate on the kingdom’s exchange rate in the […]
|By Lawrie Williams| As we come up to the Easter holiday and trading gets thin, the opportunities for traders to manipulate precious metals prices up or down become easier and for the moment, those who would like to see prices lower are in the ascendant. Whether gold goes into freefall and loses all its gains achieved so far this year is the big question on gold investors’ lips. […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Investment Corporation of Dubai is seeking to raise over a billion dollars for its real estate projects, people familiar with the move have been reported as saying. The banks being approached apparently include Emirates NBD, Dubai Islamic Bank and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. The projects are said to include a new Atlantis resort Palm Jumeirah island and a new tower at the DIFC. […]
HSBC Holdings cut its price estimates for Dubai developer Emaar Properties and peers including Damac Properties Dubai Co., predicting falling revenue and declining property prices in the United Arab Emirates. Emaar’s price estimate was slashed 26 percent to 8.5 dirhams, while Damac’s is 8 percent lower at 3.4 dirhams, HSBC said in a note on Thursday. The bank also lowered its target for Aldar Properties to 3.5 […]
Gold and its miners’ stocks are rocketing higher as speculators and investors alike return to this left-for-dead sector. This sudden deluge of capital inflows has crowned gold stocks the best-performing sector of this young new year by far, shocking traders. And this stunning reversal of fortunes in both the metal and the companies producing it is only starting, so it’s exceedingly important to understand what’s going on. […]
|By Matein Khalid| “One country, two systems”. This was the historic formula under which Margaret Thatcher agreed to hand over the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, then ruled by Paramount Leader Deng Xiao Ping. The Hong Kong dollar’s spike to 7.81, on the high end of its 7.75 – 7.85 band, demonstrates the sheer scale of the speculative attack against […]
The slump in the price of gold has brought investors all over the world closer to their much-loved asset. As gold, a known haven asset, became comparatively cheap in 2015, central banks showed a keen interest. Increased volatility in the world markets has caused the central banks to invest their money in haven assets. Central banks as a whole have added 175 tons of gold to their official reserves. The Chinese and […]
A man opens the shutter of a shop painted with an advertisement of Reliance Communications in Mumbai, India, November 3, 2015. Reuters/Shailesh Andrade/Files MUMBAI India’s Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom) expects to reach a deal to sell its mobile phone masts business to a group of companies led by buyout firm TPG Capital Management LP in the next two weeks, its chief executive said on Monday. RCom last […]
The $15 trillion rout in global equity markets since May is reawakening the lure of gold for investors seeking safety. Hedge funds more than doubled their net-long position in bullion last week, just three weeks after they were the most-bearish ever. Investor holdings of gold through exchange-traded products are expanding at the fastest pace in a year, and the value of the ETPs has jumped by $3 […]
|By Lawrence Williams| With an increase of 21.8 tonnes in its gold reserves in December, Russia continues to build its central bank bullion holdings – largely through buying in its most of its own domestic production. Russia was the world’s third largest gold producer (after China and Australia) in 2014 in producing 266.2 tonnes – only 6 tonnes less than Australia. It will be interesting to see […]
In a world awash with cheap oil, buyers in the world’s biggest consuming region aren’t clamoring for an additional 500,000 barrels a day from Iran. As international sanctions against the country are lifted and Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh looks to make good on his pledge to regain market share lost in Asia, he’ll have to contend with a global glut that’s dragged down prices and spawned […]
As Iran emerges from a decade of international sanctions, its Gulf Arab rivals are facing their toughest economic predicament since the global financial crisis. Governments across the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council are taking unprecedented measures to counter the slump in oil prices, curtailing some of the world’s most generous welfare systems to plug widening budget deficits. In some countries, contractors are facing delays in government payments, while […]
Gulf Arabs could pull billions in investment money from the United States if Donald Trump wins the presidency later this year, billionaire UAE businessman Khalaf Al Habtoor told Reuters. Trump, front-runner to be the Republican presidential candidate, triggered outrage around the world when he advocated a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. The United States “will lose their businesses, people will cancel any plans of […]
Saudi Arabia’s potential initial public offering of its state oil company could be the largest ever, a juicy target for any ambitious Wall Street bank. In a country traditionally cold to outsiders, only a few have the experience to win it. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and HSBC Holdings Plc are among international lenders in the best position to win a role if the kingdom goes ahead with […]
Sanrio, the Japanese owner of the Hello Kitty brand, on Monday said it was investigating a report that its database was hacked and private information on 3.3 million users was exposed. The leaked data from the fan site of the Japanese toy company includes information like users’ full names, email addresses and encrypted passwords, according to the report by security website CSOonline.com, which cited researcher Chris Vickery. […]
Reuters/Abhishek N. Chinnappa/Files MUMBAI Flipkart on Monday denied a newspaper report that said venture capital firm Accel Partners had sold a small stake in India’s biggest online marketplace to sovereign wealth fund Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) for $100 million. “This information is incorrect. There has been no such transaction,” a Flipkart spokesman told Reuters in an emailed statement. The Economic Times newspaper earlier on Monday reported the […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Emirates landed a windfall gain this week as it guaranteed itself bulk of the US-originating passenger traffic to the Gulf by way of a decision by the United Airlines to cancel flight service between Washington and Dubai starting in late January, meaning no U.S. passenger carrier will fly direct to the Gulf states. According to a Reuters report, the move comes after the […]
|By Lawrence Williams| The ‘Nobody Cares’ quote was the theme of Grant Williams’ polished performance at Mines & Money London last week. Grant (no relation) is a Senior adviser to Vulpes Investment Management in Singapore – but is perhaps better known as the author of the always entertaining and enlightening Things that make you go hmm… newsletter. This has been published since 2009 and has become one […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s City Football Group (CFG), which owns a number football related clubs and businesses, including Manchester City FC, New York City FC, Melbourne City FC, and a minority stake in Yokohama F. Marinos, has announced a partnership with a consortium of high profile Chinese institutional investors to create an unprecedented platform for the growth of CFG clubs and […]
|By Lawrence Williams| Let’s face it, the gold price seems to bear little correlation to global physical metal demand. In the face of reducing supply (low gold prices keep scrap sales depressed, new mined gold supply is plateauing and beginning to fall and sales out of the big gold ETFs this year are a fraction of those seen back in 2013) and increasing demand – China, India […]
|By TAP Staff| The GFMS Gold Survey for the third quarter is bearish on the short term prospects of gold and expects the metal to trade back down below $1,100/oz for the remaining months of the 2015. According to the survey, published by Thomson Reuters, gold is set to remain under pressure until there is more clarity on the timing and the scale of US rates normalisation. […]
|By Matein Khalid| Saudi Arabia has fascinated me since I first met Hani AZ Yamani as a teenage student all those years ago at Wharton. Hani’s father was Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, legendary Saudi Oil Minister (1962-86) under Kings Faisal, Khalid and Fahd. Sheikh Yamani managed the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, survived a terrorist assault in Vienna by Carlos the Jackal, midwifed the birth of Saudi […]
|By TAP Staff| Majid Al Futtaim Holding is weighing an offer to acquire Abu Dhabi consumer finance firm Dunia Finance, Chief Executive Officer Alain Bejjani said in an interiew. “Dunia is an opportunity that was presented to us, so we are looking at it,” Bejjani said, but clarified that the company has not yet decided on a formal bid. Dunia’s shareholders, including Mubadala Development Co. and a unit […]
|By Matein Khalid| 2015 has been a horror story for emerging markets and Asian shares have not escaped the fallout from the 40% plunge in Shanghai/Shenzhen since June. Yet financial markets discount the future while UAE investors invariably extrapolate the recent past. So even while I resurrect the ghosts of 1998 when Suharto’s regime fell amid anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta, South Korea was forced to accept a […]
