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 […]
Matein Khalid 2026 has started with a bullish bang for my Dr. Copper trade, even though a single trading session when half of Asia is still getting over its New Year’s Day hangover is hardly an optimal sample size. Yet as I see LME spot copper trade at $12500 a metric ton, I feel exhilarated as this is precisely the breakout I flagged for my friends and […]
Matein Khalid My very best wishes to my friends and readers for a wonderful Christmas break and may the New Year bring the world the peace the human race so richly deserves. I will be in Alex/Cairo to revisit and pay my homage to the genius of Pharonic antiquity supplemented by the Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Fatimid, Seljuk, Mamluk, Ottoman, French, British and even Soviet brutalist influences […]
Matein Khalid The Indian equity markets have experienced one of Asia’s most frenetic IPO bonanzas in 2024-25 even if no less than 50% of all new flotations are now trading below their offer price. Despite the decline of the Indian rupee’s new low against the dollar beyond 91 and Dalal Street’s underperformance relative to my fave emerging markets Argentina, Poland and Brazil in 2025, the macro omens […]
Matein Khalid I was sure the Medline IPO would be a winner since I have tracked this business since it was acquired in a $30 billion leveraged buyout by Blackstone, Carlyle and the San Fran private equity house Hellman & Friedman after the bankers priced the deal at 29, I even wrote a post several hours before the New York open, reiterating that the largest private equity […]
Matein Khalid 2025 was the year I was convinced that silver would outperform gold in a classic late cycle acceleration trade that is a recurrent theme in full throttle precious metal bull markets. This means, silver has a tendency to lag gold’s ascent until an inflection point at which prices breakout and then accelerate sharply on the upside. This inflection point was $36 an ounce in spot […]
Matein Khalid Oracle’s Q2 earnings vindicated my call to stay short Microsoft and SoftBank as public market proxies for OpenAI, whose $500 billion valuation should realistically be marked down by 50% to reflect current ground realities which will get much worse. I was aghast to see Oracle slump by another 11% on Nasdaq but not at all surprised when Microsoft shed $18 in last night’s session/after market. […]
Matein Khalid When the rats scramble to escape a sinking ship as hungry sharks circle the blood red water, the end is near. 100 insider Johnnies sold $6.5 billion in OpenAI shares in a recent employee tender. Why bailout now at $500 billion if OpenAI is a slam dunk for a trillion dollar IPO next year? Simple. The 100 newly minted decamillionaires know that OpenAI can no […]
Matein Khalid want my Arabic friends to address me from now on as Abu Nuhas or Father of Copper. Why? The red metal that has been human kind’s best mineral friend for 30,000 years is also the best conductor of electricity known to man, woman or beast as the AI revolution necessitates a multi-trillion dollar demand shock in upgrading the power grid as the world electrifies, decarbonizes […]
Matein Khalid India’s NSE Nifty scaled a milestone on Dalal Street this morning, rising 160 points as I write to 26205. This has little to do with Nvidia/Jensen Huang’s fabulous guidance last night and everything to do with global fund managers attracted Asia’s Cinderella EM of 2025 by the BJP’s supply side policy pivot to slash the GST, ramp up post-Bihar election capex, boost consumption even as […]
Matein Khalid The bloodbath in Bitcoin is symbolic of the risk aversion spasm that has now hit risk assets as varied as Japan’s Nikkei Dow, Nasdaq’s Mag-7, gold and even the EM carry trade. The AI infrastructure trade that was the high octane fuel for the most frenzied bubble in Silicon Valley history has lost its luster (price momentum is the mandate of heaven on Wall Street), […]
Matein Khalid Amazon (AMZN) shares were a doggy of the Mag-7 for most of 2025, falling as low as 161 in late April during the post Liberation Day temper tantrum by Mr. Market and trading in a narrow 200-225 range since late summer on concerns that AWS was losing ground to Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud computing league tables. Even now, at 244 it […]
Matein Khalid Jay Powell has put cold water on a December FOMC rate cut as inflation risk triggers dissent at the Fed. Yet Uncle Jay is now a lame duck and the world awaits his first MAGA Fed Chairman. My bet is on Kevin H as I doubt if even a supine Senate will confirm yes man – Stephen Miran. Why even bother to hold the FOMC […]
Matein Khalid Critical minerals have become a national security priority for GCC states as China has weaponised its dominance over supply chains, refining capacity and magnet production. These materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, tin, tungsten, vanadium and germanium, are essential for defence systems such as Lockheed’s F-35 stealth fighters, Raytheon’s hypersonic missiles and General Dynamics’ Virginia-class submarines, as well as civilian applications in advanced semiconductors, electric vehicles, […]
Matein Khalid The supply glut in crude oil, the fragile geopolitics of the Levant, the Gaza wars, the thinnest sovereign credit spreads since the summer of 2006 have not ended the scramble to pick up MENA credit when the issuer is not a serial borrower/distressed credit and the bonds issue reflects improving political/economic fundamentals. The year ago, Oman and Bahrain provided some amazing opportunities for capital gains […]
Matein Khalid Stock exchange folklore in pre-1929 Jazz Age New York has one priceless insight for me – “you be buying when they are crying, you be selling when they are yelling”. So as I scan the markets, I realized that the mother of all yelling is taking place in the AI arena and its decibel count is loudest where the ignorance about its nuances is the […]
Matein Khalid I have made no secret about my conviction that Brazil’s Nu Bank (NU) and China’s Alibaba (BABA) are my two fave emerging market’s fintechs of destiny since 2024. Alibaba has risen almost 100% since I accumulated its shares in the mid 80’s in its New York ADR once it was evident that the Politburo had pivoted to Big Bang fiscal/monetary stimulus to goose the dormant […]
Matein Khalid Real estate occasionally provides prescient investors the ability to make serious capital gains with minimal or even zero risk. Take the Empire of the Rising Sun and the sinking yen, also known as Japan. The ruling LDP has shed its Komeito coalition partner and is all set to embrace Sanae Takaichi as Lady Shogun or Dai Nippon’s first elected woman Prime Minister. This means higher […]
Matein Khalid Private equity and money center banks on Wall Street are in free fall even as the private credit market is in classic contagion mode, without a lender of the last resort for overleveraged shadow banks/hedge funds whose illiquid assets now disappear into Wall Street’s structured vehicles blackholes. Peekaboo Finance 101! When Citigroup and Brent crude both fall 8% in a synchronized bearish death dive, I […]
Matein Khalid Gold is in its most spectacular bull run since 1976-1980, when prices rocketed from $91 to over $800 an ounce. The current cycle found its floor near $1,800 in late 2022, as the Powell Fed’s rate-hike campaign peaked and Washington froze $300 billion in Russian reserves in response to the invasion of Ukraine. “Dr Auric” now trades at just over $4,000 an ounce – a perfect vindication of […]
Matein Khalid Will we still be dancing when the music stops as Citigroup and UBS were in the autumn of 2007. Even my friends dissed me when I predicted a global financial crash as early as January 2007, but I track credit cycles like a bloodhound and it flashed the mother of all distressed SOS’s as it does now. In 2007, the trillion dollar daisy chain of […]
Matein Khalid The old adage that stock markets swing between fear and greed has been borne out by the mixed performance of Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index over the first nine months of 2025. A turning point came on Wednesday September 24 when the Tadawul staged its biggest single-day rally since 2020, after a Capital Market Authority board member signalled that the 49 percent foreign ownership cap on Saudi equities […]
Matein Khalid Wall Street’s strong bid is skating on macro thin ice as a government shutdown that reflects the toxic polarization in Congress looms. The latest PCE data shows that Powell’s fear for a tariff related uptick in inflation was well founded and Fed funds futures have narrowed the odds of a December rate cut to only 60%, which is perfectly rational given that the US economy […]
