UAE stocks ended the day mixed yesterday in lacklustre trading as investors waited on the sidelines for third-quarter earnings.
Abu Dhabi’s benchmark stock measure, the ADX General Index, rose 0.2 per cent, while the Dubai Financial Market General Index slipped 0.6 per cent. Etisalat, the country’s biggest telecoms company, led gains in Abu Dhabi while Amlak Finance, the Sharia-compliant mortgage company, led the decline in Dubai.
“UAE stocks have been very range-bound and volatile on relatively low volumes,” said Sachin Mohindra, a portfolio manager at Invest AD, an Abu Dhabi-based asset management firm. “That’s been the story for pretty much all of August, September, now even in October. People are now waiting for quarterly results.”
He said UAE stocks have been pretty much taking cues from global markets, which have been equally volatile as investors debate when the US Federal Reserve may raise rates, the extent of China’s slowdown and whether as a result commodity prices will remain depressed for an extended time.
The announcement on Monday by the telecoms authority that Etisalat will no longer have a monopoly on fixed lines failed to dent interest in the stock amid ongoing speculation that the company’s shares will next month be included in the MSCI Emerging Markets index, a benchmark measure for the asset class, after it moved to allow foreigners to hold stakes earlier this year. The stock rose 2 per cent.
“I think the stock is up because of MSCI,” said Sanyalak Manibhandu, the head of research at NBAD Securities. “It’s not because of the company’s operations but because people think that there are enough institutional investors to get Etisalat on the MSCI list in November.”
mkassem@thenational.ae
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