Arab stock markets gained more than US$60 billion (Dh220.38bn) in value in the third quarter of this year even as liquidity tumbled, data from the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) show.
The overall value of Arab markets has jumped by 7.7 per cent during the third quarter of this year to $933.1bn compared with $870bn for the third quarter last year.
It is still well below the approximately $1.39 trillion stock value of Arab markets by the end of June 2008, before the global financial crisis took hold. Saudi Arabia was the star performer as the Tadawul All-Share Index's value climbed by 5.3 per cent to $336.4bn by the end of September compared with the third quarter last year, representing 36 per cent of the total value of Arab exchanges, the biggest proportion.
The highest increase in market value from last year's third quarter to this year's third quarter was registered at the Tunisian exchange, with a 25.5 rise, followed by the Kuwaiti exchange's 22.3 per cent and the Qatari exchange's 11 per cent.
But trading volumes and liquidity continued to slip in the third quarter as traders lost confidence in the markets and foreign institutions largely reduced their activities in the region. The value of traded stocks in all Arab exchanges during the third quarter fell by 42.6 per cent to $69.4bn, compared with the previous quarter.
The value of traded stocks in the markets of Saudi, Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Egypt accounted for 89 per cent of the overall trading value in Arab markets during the third quarter, of which 51 per cent is accounted for by Saudi's market alone. Daily average trading declined by about 39.2 per cent in third quarter with $1.13bn daily compared with $1.87bn daily in the third quarter of last year and the number of traded stocks declined by 20.8 per cent in third quarter to 41.6 billion stocks compared with 52.5 billion in the second quarter.
