Middle East Market Wrap 2 September: Egypt and Jordan hold gains as 7 of 9 regional benchmarks fall

By The Edge Research Team

The regional board turned down on Wednesday 2 September 2026. Of the 9 headline market benchmarks tracked here, 7 fell and 2 rose, a reversal from Tuesday when 6 of the same 9 rose. Egypt’s EGX 30 led again with a gain of 0.45 percent, and Jordan’s ASE Index was the only other gauge to finish higher. Qatar’s QE Index was the weakest at minus 1.03 percent.

The simple average across those 9 benchmarks moved from plus 0.21 percent on Tuesday to minus 0.29 percent on Wednesday, a swing of 0.50 percentage points, on our calculation. The spread from the strongest gauge to the weakest widened slightly, from 1.36 percentage points to 1.48 percentage points. The move was therefore broad rather than concentrated: no single market collapsed, and most of the board drifted lower together.

In early trade Reuters tied a decline in Gulf equities to the overnight exchange of strikes between the United States and Iran, naming Emaar Properties and Salik in Dubai, Industries Qatar and Qatar National Bank in Doha, and First Abu Dhabi Bank and Alpha Dhabi Holding in Abu Dhabi among the fallers. Those were early session moves rather than closing prices.

Crude reversed its early spike and physical market stress persisted

Wednesday did not produce the simple pattern of higher oil and firmer Gulf equities. Regional equities fell on a session when crude ran up early and then gave the move back. Brent stood at 94.08 dollars a barrel by 11:35 GMT, down 57 cents, and West Texas Intermediate at 89.50 dollars, down 72 cents, after both touched their highest since 24 July earlier in the session, at 97.04 and 92.29 dollars. So the equity market was lower while the commodity that had driven the previous session’s gains was retreating from its own high. That is a sequence, not a cause, and the more defensible reading is that risk around the conflict outweighed any benefit the region’s exporters take from a firmer oil price.

What did tighten was the physical trade. Four commodity vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday 1 September, against 10 the previous day and a ten day average of about 13, on preliminary Kpler data. That is roughly 31 percent of the recent average, on our calculation. Separately, 3 liquefied natural gas cargoes loaded in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were transferred ship to ship outside the strait in recent weeks for delivery to India and Japan, with Asian spot liquefied natural gas prices at a 5 month high of 23.20 dollars per million British thermal units.

Saudi Arabia’s national shipping company, Bahri, said 2 Filipino seafarers were killed in a security incident involving its vessel SIDR while transiting the strait on 31 August. The Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned the attack and, in a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency, affirmed the necessity of halting escalation and respecting the security and safety of international navigation and the security of global energy supplies, calling on all parties to de-escalate and return to negotiations.

Egypt rose against negative market breadth

The EGX 30 closed at 55,679.72, up 248.43 points, its second consecutive advance. Underneath it the market was not broadly higher. The Egyptian Exchange’s own session data records 94 gaining issues against 120 decliners and 10 unchanged, so decliners outnumbered gainers by 26 while the blue chip index rose. The EGX 30 is a free float capitalisation weighted blue chip gauge with a liquidity screen, not a simple ranking of the largest companies, and on Wednesday it advanced despite negative breadth beneath it. Trading across those gaining, declining and unchanged issues came to 15.13 billion Egyptian pounds on 3.422 billion shares and 334,223 trades, summing the exchange’s own 3 rows. Total market capitalisation stood at 4.38 trillion pounds. The exchange separately publishes a wider listed market line that runs to 129.01 billion pounds; that figure covers a broader perimeter than the traded equity issues above and is not the cash equity turnover.

The Central Bank of Egypt’s official rate on 2 September was 51.0414 pounds to buy a dollar and 51.1808 to sell.

Saudi Arabia: large caps underperformed

The Tadawul All Share Index eased 0.80 percent to 11,012.18. The MSCI Tadawul 30, which tracks 30 of the largest and most liquid securities on the Saudi Exchange, fell further at 0.97 percent to 1,478.72, and the Nomu Parallel Market fell least of the 3 at 0.68 percent to 21,697.96. The gap of 0.17 percentage points between the large capitalisation gauge and the all share index is consistent with somewhat heavier pressure among larger stocks, although the pattern was not uniform.

Individual closes on the exchange’s own board show that unevenness directly. Saudi Aramco ended at 26.02 riyals, down 0.61 percent, a smaller fall than the index. Against the trend, Petro Rabigh closed at 18.00 riyals, up 2.56 percent, and Bahri at 35.58 riyals, up 0.62 percent, the latter on the same day its tanker casualty was confirmed.

Saudi Arabia’s National Debt Management Center sold 3.25 billion dollars of dollar denominated sukuk on Tuesday, its first international sukuk sale of the year, arranged through KSA Ijara Sukuk Limited under the Kingdom’s Global Trust Certificate Issuance Program. The centre put the final order book at about 16.5 billion dollars, 5 times the issue size, with proceeds earmarked for general budgetary needs. This series covers that sale in a separate report.

Qatar was the weakest board

The QE Index closed at 9,751.31, down 101.52 points. Qatar News Agency reported the index opening 0.63 percent lower with every sector under pressure, industrials down 1.21 percent, real estate down 0.87 percent, insurance down 0.71 percent, and banks and financial services down 0.43 percent, and the market did not recover through the session.

Separately, Fitch Ratings published a comment on 1 September noting that an extended conflict could increase risks to some Gulf Cooperation Council issuer ratings under a scenario in which strait traffic is disrupted through most of 2027. The agency records that war driven negative rating actions so far have been limited, and that they include Rating Watch Negative on Qatar at AA, on entities linked to the Qatari sovereign, on Ras al Khaimah at A plus, and on some developers in the United Arab Emirates. It also states that very large sovereign financial buffers in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi, and Qatar have been key in limiting the conflict’s impact on ratings. These are 2 separate facts on the same day and this report does not assert a causal link between them.

The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait

The FTSE ADX General Index fell 0.68 percent to 9,906.40 and the FADX15 fell 0.84 percent. The DFM General Index fell 0.33 percent to 5,814.94, the smallest decline among the Gulf’s larger boards.

In Kuwait the 3 segments moved within 8 hundredths of a percentage point of one another. The Kuwait All Share fell 0.42 percent to 8,866.65, the Premier Market 0.35 percent to 9,264.91 and the BK Main 50 index 0.34 percent to 10,965.28. Boursa Kuwait reported turnover of 76.77 million dinars on 344.5 million shares across 25,017 trades. The Kuwaiti Cabinet approved a draft decree law on government sukuk on Tuesday and referred it for final approval, the Kuwait News Agency reported, a step toward a domestic sovereign issuance framework.

Elsewhere Bahrain’s All Share Index eased 0.10 percent to 1,938.66 and Oman’s MSX 30 was close to unchanged at minus 0.05 percent, closing at 7,607.037. Jordan’s ASE Index rose 0.35 percent, the Jordan News Agency reported, on turnover of 11.5 million dinars across 3,502 transactions.

Closes for Wednesday 2 September 2026, ranked by change. The count of 7 of 9 falling uses 1 headline benchmark per market: the Tadawul All Share, Kuwait All Share, QE Index, Bahrain All Share, MSX 30, ASE Index, EGX 30, FTSE ADX General and DFM General. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are counted as 2 separate market benchmarks within the same country, so the 9 cover 8 countries. The remaining rows are additional segment or comparison gauges. The Nomu Parallel Market and the FTSE ADX General Index both round to minus 0.68 percent and are ranked on their unrounded values. Every level except 2 was read from the index’s own exchange, and each was checked against this series’ published close for 1 September: the Saudi reading was taken only after the exchange’s market status label had moved past the closing auction to Negotiated Deals Only, and Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Egypt each carried their own closed session stamp. The Dubai Financial Market’s website returned an empty page on 2 consecutive attempts and the Qatar Stock Exchange’s site renders no index values, so those 2 levels come from the operator’s terminal; both reconcile exactly against this series’ published closes for 1 September, 5,834.25 for Dubai and 9,852.83 for Qatar, and neither exchange is credited for them. The Amman Stock Exchange’s own site was unreachable and the Jordan News Agency publishes the index rounded to whole points, so the Jordanian percentage is the agency’s own figure and does not reconcile precisely against the rounded level shown.

Elsewhere, Most Recent Completed Sessions

European exchanges were open but had not completed Wednesday’s session at this capture, and United States markets had not yet opened. The Asian table below carries Wednesday 2 September, which was complete. The European and United States tables carry Tuesday 1 September, the most recently completed session in each region.

Asia, 2 September close, for reference

Closing levels carried from this series’ Asia wrap for the 2 September 2026 session. The 4 rows shown are the strongest and weakest of that board plus Hong Kong and India; the full 10 gauge table sits in that report. The Straits Times level is a vendor quote and is provisional there, pending a dated record from Singapore Exchange.

Europe, 1 September close, for reference

Closing levels carried from this series’ Europe wrap for the 1 September 2026 session, ranked by change. The FTSE 100 change is measured against Friday 28 August because London was closed on Monday for the Summer Bank Holiday. Deutsche Boerse has since published its dated price history row for 1 September and gives the DAX close as 25,970.11, confirming the level carried in that report.

United States, 1 September close, for reference

Closing levels carried from this series’ United States wrap for the 1 September 2026 session. The Russell 2000, which fell 1.23 percent to 2,920.13, is omitted here only to hold this table to 4 rows and is carried in full in that report.

Sources: Saudi Exchange, the Tadawul All Share, MSCI Tadawul 30 and Nomu closes read after the market status label moved past the closing auction, and individual company closes; Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, the FTSE ADX General and FADX15 closes; Boursa Kuwait, the Kuwait All Share, Premier Market and BK Main 50 closes and session turnover; Bahrain Bourse, the All Share Index and its previous index field; Muscat Stock Exchange, the MSX 30 close; The Egyptian Exchange, the EGX 30 close and the session gainers, decliners and unchanged rows; Central Bank of Egypt, the official exchange rate for 2 September 2026; Reuters, the Gulf equity session report, the crude and Strait of Hormuz shipping data attributed to Kpler, the liquefied natural gas cargo transfers and the Bahri statement; Saudi Arabia’s National Debt Management Center, the sukuk sale and its final order book; Saudi Press Agency, the Foreign Ministry statement; Qatar News Agency, the Qatar Stock Exchange session report; Kuwait News Agency, the Cabinet decision on government sukuk; Jordan News Agency, the Amman Stock Exchange session; Fitch Ratings, its 1 September 2026 comment on Gulf Cooperation Council ratings; The Edge, the Asia Market Wrap covering the 2 September 2026 session and the Europe, United States and Commodities wraps covering 1 September 2026.

Get Complimentary Insights

Follow us