Saturday 14 May 2011

Saudi Stock Market close - May 14, 2011

General Index
Intraday 3 month

* market data delayed by 20 min.
Daily Statistics
Date14/05/2011
General Index6713.63
Change (%)-0.13%
Change-8.75
T. Volume258633300
T. Companies 149
Advanced80
Declined51
Unchanged14
UnTraded4

Saudi Shares Snap Four-Day Winning Streak on Swinging Oil Prices, Economy - Bloomberg

Saudi Arabian shares dropped the most in a week, snapping four days of gains as swinging oil prices raised concerns about the economy of the world’s largest crude exporter.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC), the world’s biggest petrochemicals maker and Al Rajhi Bank (RJHI), the kingdom’s largest publicly traded lender by market value, paced the losses.

The 146-member Tadawul All Share Index (SASEIDX) declined 0.35 percent, the measure’s largest intra-day loss since May 7, to 6,698.79 at 12:13 p.m. in Riyadh. Seven shares dropped for every six stocks that gained.

Sell UAE stocks in May and come back in August! « ArabianMoney

It’s that time of year again. Every year financial journalists dust off the old canard : ‘Sell in May and go away!’ The statistically inclined can rustle up a case for and against. Some try to argue that ‘it’s different this time’, another stock markert cliche.

The argument propounded by brokers in Gulf News today revolved around hopes that the UAE bourse may join the MSCI emerging markets index in June, thereby forcing foreign fund managers to buy the blue chips.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger is back

May 13, 2011

Blogger is back


Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish. We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers. We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger

gulfnews : Summer exit: may be not this time

It's that time of year when UAE investors, as many in other global markets, start contemplating whether to stay out of the market during the long summer period, when volumes drop and there's usually no catalyst to drive prices.

Unlike previous years, when large number of retail investors exited, this summer could be different, according to some market observers.

With the local markets stabilising from the lows of March and the possibility of the UAE being upgraded to the MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) emerging markets index, investors may do well to stay put, according to those who harbour a positive outlook.

Egypt turns to IMF to close funding gap | beyondbrics – FT.com

Egypt has turned to the International Monetary Fund to help see it through a gap in financing that has loomed larger and larger since the revolution that toppled the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

But Samir Radwan, finance minister (pictured), said the hoped-for $10bn-$12bn package from the IMF and other lenders would provide only temporary relief. “I need support for six months to a year, but after that I need investment,” he commented after the IMF said on Thursday it would send a team to Cairo soon to examine the request.

The IMF statement came hours after Radwan detailed in Cairo the losses to the economy sparked by the political turmoil of recent months.

gulfnews : Sharjah Islamic's $500m bond to tap high market liquidity

Sharjah Islamic Bank met investors last week with plans to sell as much as $500 million (Dh1.8 billion) of sukuk as a scarcity of offerings drives down borrowing costs for banks to record lows in the Arabian Gulf.

Sales of Islamic bonds from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) slumped 58 per cent to $964 million so far this year, compared with the same period of 2010, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The Sharjah-based bank, which has a $225 million floating-rate sukuk due in October, said in March it hired HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered for a sale of five-year sukuk in the second quarter.

Blogger was unavailable throughout yesterday, Friday! Obviously beyond my control.