Protests Trigger the Worst Day for Egyptian Stocks Since 2016 - Bloomberg

Protests Trigger the Worst Day for Egyptian Stocks Since 2016 - Bloomberg:

Egyptian stocks tumbled after anti-government protests threatened to tarnish the nation’s hard-won image as an emerging-market safe haven.

The EGX30 retreated 5.3%, the most for any single day since 2016, as every member declined, while the wider EGX100 index lost 5.7%, its biggest drop since 2012. Though the weekend demonstrations against President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s government weren’t large, they occurred in cities and towns across the country, and evoked memories of the years of instability following the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

The “protest risk is not trivial,” Hasnain Malik, Dubai-based global head of equity research at Tellimer Markets Inc., said in a note. It’s especially precarious given the “significant foreign capital parked in local-currency bonds, an exchange-rate that’s no longer cheap on a real effective exchange-rate basis and the near-universally positive view of foreign investors on Egypt equities,” he said.