When Donald Trump speaks, retail traders in the UAE apparently don’t wait around to read the fine print. Capital.com’s Middle East CEO Tarik Chebib told Fortune that Trump’s political announcements trigger near-instant price swings and a measurable surge in trading activity across the platform, outpacing the market response to Federal Reserve decisions and major US economic data releases.
A new kind of market signal
Chebib, who has led Capital.com’s MENA operations since 2022, was direct about what the platform is seeing on the ground. “We see the price fluctuation immediately, and that will lead to trades,” he said. “We see that there’s more activity around those kinds of announcements.”
Capital.com reported record trading volumes in the MENA region for Q1 2025, crediting both rising local appetite for retail trading and the broader wave of global market volatility.
Why the Middle East is paying close attention
