Middle East & Africa

South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange is to benefit from a policy change by South Africa’s National Treasury that allows foreign domiciled companies to be included in domestic indices.

Investors looking for alpha in frontier markets should expect to pay the price of wider spreads and longer execution times, according to new research.

Poor capital market infrastructure and limited liquidity in African companies are larger concerns for institutional investors already investing in the continent than fears about bribery and corruption, a survey by Middle Eastern investment asset manager Invest AD along with the Economist Intelligence Unit has found.

The Saudi Stock Exchange – known as the Tadawul – is expected to open up to direct foreign investment later this year, as part of a reform agenda aimed at modernising the country’s securities markets.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange has established a point-of-presence (PoP) at a UK data centre with low-latency service provider Fixnetix, facilitating access to its bourse for non-domestic market participants.

Qatar's inability to improve foreign ownership limitations and continuing fears over how the UAE deals with failed trades have stopped index provider MSCI from upgrading the two countries to emerging markets status.

The Bahrain Financial Exchange, the first multi-asset exchange in the Middle East and North Africa region, has commenced trading on its conventional market segment.

UK telecoms provider BT has added market data from the Qatar Exchange to its Radianz Cloud community as it continues to build up its exchange connectivity network.

Deutsche Bank is now providing direct access to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, allowing institutional clients to access the bourse through the German bank’s Autobahn Equity business.

Global agency broker Bloomberg Tradebook has launched a DMA trading platform that will connect local and international institutional investors to two United Arab Emirates stock exchanges.