Matein Khalid Imran Khan described the fall of Kabul as liberation, I wonder if he has seen the images of desperate Afghans trying to flee their “liberation” by the odious Taliban – mothers handing over babies over the razor wire, the country’s best and brightest coming back to the airport after the savage suicide bomb attack, which was the Taliban’s modus operandi to slaughter the citizens of […]
Matein Khalid It is time that the government and WHO tell the world that the mutations of the COVID virus will ensure that seven billion human immune systems are vulnerable to the molecular vagaries of its genetic code. In essence, there is no such thing as the end of COVID as we have all assumed after vaccines last November. True, my knowledge of human biology is self […]
By Matein Khalid Mark Twain was so right when he observed that “history does not repeat but it surely rhymes”. In 1992, Soviet vassal President Najibullah was publicly hanged by the Taliban when it seized Kabul in 1996. Shah Shuja, the grandson of the Afghan state’s founder was put on the throne by the East India Company and its Bengal Army but was murdered in 1842 by […]
By Matein Khalid The horrific fall of Kabul to the Taliban is an indictment of both the systemic corruption that plagued the Ashraf Ghani government and the policy incompetence of the Biden White House in a critical stage of the war. In retrospect, the US had no business negotiating with the primitive savages of the Taliban who have never severed their links with Al Qaeda and ISIS […]
Despite the recent softer tone for the US dollar, a deterioration in US/China geopolitics and a rise in the delta/lambda variants of coronavirus, gold has been unable to breakout convincingly above the 1800 an ounce on any safe haven buying binge. The only possible conclusion is that Auric is still traumatized by the Federal Reserve’s signal that it will taper its monetary policy on a time table […]
Airbnb (ABNB) is one of the great investment regrets of my life since I turned down a chance to invest in it a decade ago at a valuation of a mere $1 billion, even though a lady far smarter than me invested $10 million in it and is now a Silicon Valley billionaire from Dubai. ABNB has been a disaster in 2021 since it peaked at 219.94 […]
After an epic fall in 2020-2021 due the coronavirus shock and the subsequent explosion in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to its current $8.2 trillion, the US dollar has made a counter cyclical move to 93 on its trade weighted index (DXY). The catalyst for this move are massive Japanese purchase of long duration US Treasury bonds, Chinese central bank intervention to arrest the rise of the […]
I owe a debt of gratitude to a brilliant, young, Gen-Z Mademoiselle, whose knowledge of the Silicon Valley ecosystem (and tango!) has helped me source and syndicate some of the best VC financed late stage pre-IPO deals ever seen in the Middle East. Prose is way too prosaic to express my admiration for her talent and diligence and I do not want to write her a poem […]
Matein Khalid 2020 was a spectacular year for investing in late stage technology unicorns and I am proud to have led significant investor syndicates from the Gulf for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the e-learning marketplace Udemy and Swedish fintech Klarna Bank. The secondary markets for the world’s most successful, most coveted, fastest growing and most disruptive technology companies have now come of age and offer extraordinary opportunities for […]
By Matein Khalid The brutal correction in NASDAQ last week did not spare such former tech sector darlings as cloud software, semiconductors and social media shares. The Big Daddy of social media is Facebook (symbol FB) and its shares were slammed by $19 on NASDAQ to $262 or $42 below its recent high. Even though Facebook beat the Street’s EPS whisper number, its CFO confessed that member […]
By Matein Khalid My conviction that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the tech unicorn of our lifetimes was vindicated by the spectacular institutional response to its $1 billion Series N offering in August. The round was oversubscribed by the smart money/tech cognoscenti of Silicon Valley by a staggering 10 times, forcing the company to almost double the size of the offering. I am convinced that the company’s Starlink […]
By Matein Khalid While brick and mortar property in Dubai is in a vicious bear market spiral, the COVID pandemic has been a dramatic money making opportunity in the shares of industrial property landlords. I had recommended the shares of Prologis (PLD), the NY listed logistics REIT at $60 on April 15th, 2018 and had it published in my media columns in the GCC and Britain. Prologis […]
By Matein Khalid In the past 18 years, after a series of spectacular and occasionally failed rocket launches, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has emerged as Silicon Valley’s next colossus, a once in a generation business in the same league as an Amazon, a Google or a Microsoft. SpaceX’s current funding round values the company at a pre-money valuation of $42 billion. Yet the cognoscenti of Wall Street and […]
By Matein Khalid The US Dollar Index has fallen almost 6% since its March 2020 highs. This is no surprise given the sheer scale and speed of the Federal Reserve’s response to the pandemic – a $3 trillion rise in the balance sheet, a buying spree in US Treasury, agency, MBS and corporate debt, backstop programs in the corporate credit markets. In addition, Jerome Powell resorted to […]
By Matein Khalid Last week witnessed a feeding frenzy from the crème de la crème of Wall Street’s smart money (and some Dubai’s smart money LOL!) to be part of the private market financing of Reliance Jio, the emerging supernova of India’s digital ecosystem. After having spent $50 billion in building a scalable, state of the art wireless network, Mukesh Ambani realized that he needed strategic investors […]
By Matein Khalid Oscar Wilde once spoke of his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fabled Bosie, as “the love that dare not speak its name”, in Victorian London, when Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper roamed amid the fog and the gaslights! The love that dare not speak its name in my life is, of course, my obsession with foreign exchange markets, a love that mesmerizes […]
By Matein Khalid The US dollar is the traditional safe haven currency during times of geopolitical or financial stress even when the cause of a risk aversion spasm is ultimately American, such as the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Obama’s epic budget battles with the Republicans in 2011 and the Trump White House’s drone hit on Iran’s most revered Revolutionary Guard commander on 3 January 2020. […]
By Matein Khalid I had published an article expressing my shock at the abysmal corporate governance and financial disclosure at NMC Healthcare, the London listed UAE’s largest private operator of healthcare clinics and hospitals. NMC Healthcare shares were at 1816 pence on the LSE when I published my article in the Gulf and UK financial press on 30 December 2019. NMC Healthcare has now plunged to 775 […]
By Matein Khalid Thankfully, I was not in the global markets during the Black Death, the Great Plague and the Spanish flu pandemic but coronavirus cases have now crossed 40,000 infections and this is way beyond a local Wuhan outbreak. Despite the blowout 225,000 US January non-farm payrolls growth data, I am alarmed by the global recession SOS in the capital markets metrics I track. One, the […]
By Matein Khalid My tactical idea last week to recommend buying sterling against the US dollar (cable) at 1.30 for a 1.34 target is 200 pips in the money now that the Bank of England kept the policy rate unchanged at 0.75% despite Governor Carney’s smoke signals. Sterling closed at 1.32 on Friday evening and will be well bid next week – hopefully. I expect Governor Bailey […]
By Matein Khalid NMC Health PLC, the UAE’s leading private operator of medical clinics and hospitals with a footprint in 17 countries was founded by Abu Dhabi based Indian-Udupi businessman B. R. Shetty and listed on the London Stock Exchange. NMC plunged a shocking 45% in five trading sessions after Carson Block of Muddy Waters Capital, one of the world’s preeminent short selling specialist hedge funds, accused […]
By Matein Khalid I had recommended buying the Tadawul ETF iShares MSCI Saudi Arabia (symbol KSA on NYSE) on November 30 to benefit from the post-IPO surge in the price of the Saudi Aramco IPO shares on the Tadawul. This tactical trade was a beauty even before Saudi Aramco shares soared 20% on its Thursday December 12 to peak at 38.7 Saudi riyals (SAR). As I expected, […]
By Matein Khalid I had recommended SAP shares at €82 in the Gulf financial press in early 2018 as its then CEO Bill McDermott committed the firm to the digital transformation of the UAE at Dubai’s World Government Summit. I published a second article on August 7, 2019 tilted “German software colossus SAP shares will more than double by 2023!”. The shares were €104 in Frankfurt on […]
By Matein Khalid I first encountered Lebanon as a teenager after the fabled Choueifat College opened its first UAE campus in Sharjah, fleeing the civil war in the Chouf. My ignorance of the country I was to know and love as my own patrie was monumental. When a classmate told me he was a Darzi, I assumed his father was a tailor since Darzi means “tailor” in […]
By Matein Khalid I literally laughed when I heard that Goldman Sachs put a valuation range of $1.6 to $2.3 trillion on the Saudi Aramco IPO. One, a valuation range of $700 million only means the Goldie analyst bankers (deal promoters?) are clueless about what Saudi Aramco is really worth. Two, I cannot fathom how the financial markets will assign a valuation of 17 to 23 times […]
By Matein Khalid So Boris Johnson was elected the leader of the Conservative Party by 66% of the Tory membership and thus he, not Jeremy Hunt, will go to Buck House to present his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen. This increases the risk of both no deal Brexit and a potential Tory vote of no confidence in parliament, led by Mrs. May’s Chancellor of the Exchequer […]
By Matein Khalid George Soros once observed “the big money in emerging markets is made when things go from Godawful to just plain awful”. So true. The point of maximum pessimism in an emerging market is often an opportune moment to accumulate its shares, ideally after a political, economic or financial systemic shock. I sold my entire Pakistan equities portfolio in summer of 2017 after the Supreme […]
By Matein Khalid The S&P 500 index trades at 2990 as I write. The risk-reward calculus on the broad index no longer flashes a buy signal to me. The economic data around the world has deteriorated at an accelerating pace, as the decline in global PMI’s, 9% fall in German factory orders and $13 trillion in in government debt trading at negative interest rates attest. Commodities prices […]
By Matein Khalid Goldman Sachs shares traded at 190 when I wrote this article, way below its 52 week high at 245 making it a Cinderella in global investment banking at only 8.5 times forward earnings. It is obvious that Goldman’s involvement in the $7 billion 1MDB sovereign wealth heist in Malaysia has led to global outrage, demands for a $6 billion in punitive fine by Prime […]
By Matein Khalid Thanks to the orchestrated bullishness of a dozen Wall Street sell side analysts and the mother of all short covering rallies, Uber has managed to claw back its losses from 38 to its IPO offer price of $45 though the latest management disaster and sacking of Dara’s handpicked COO and marketing lady wunderkind will slam the shares tonight. Uber has also benefited from a […]
