Update: Opening the TADAWUL up to Foreign Investors

Last week the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) confirmed that the regions largest, diverse and most mature capital market, the Tadawul, will be open to qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIs) by mid-2015. Currently, the Saudi stock markets capitalization is $528bn, equivalent to two thirds of Saudi GDP, making it larger than the Mexican stock market. When compared regionally it is almost the same size as all the other equity markets in the Gulf combined. Opening up the market is likely to lead to inclusion into the MSCI emerging market index by mid-2017, with as much as $40-50 billion of total foreign inflows. Since the publication of our original report, <a href="http://{{siteurlwithoutprotocol}}/en/download/saudi-stock-market-august-2014-1/research-10-2">Opening the Tawadul up to Foreign Investors</a>, back in August 2014, we have seen a number of developments which have impacted the Tadawul All Share Index (TASI). This includes a massive drop in oil prices which negatively impacted investor sentimental and led to panic selling, and the $6 billion initial public offering (IPO) of the National Commercial Bank (NCB), which amounted to the second-biggest IPO of 2014 globally. In this update we discuss some of these recent developments in more detail.