Capital Markets

Despite the headwinds of low oil prices and recent regional political turbulence, Abu Dhabi’s stock exchange put in a relatively strong performance in 2016, with the main index posting a 5% gain for the year. A sizeable sovereign bond sale also injected life into the emirate’s nascent debt market, reviving a yield curve that had been interrupted by a seven-year absence of sovereign issuances. The emergence of Abu Dhabi’s new financial free zone, meanwhile, has opened up a range of possibilities for the future expansion of the emirate’s capital markets, both in terms of financial support services and core investment and trading activity.