Dubai stock market up 5% , Saudi’s Tadawul climbs after oil price rally

Dubai’s stock market posted its biggest opening gain in over a year on Sunday as oil prices rallied during the weekend.

The Dubai Financial Market, which rose 6.6 per cent on opening, ended the day up 5.15 per cent.

Brent crude prices rallied above $32 a barrel on Friday, up 15 per cent from lows of $27.88 per barrel earlier in the week.

The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange also ended 2.73 per cent higher after the real estate sector posted a strong 7.26 per cent gain. Energy stocks also rose 3.9 per cent while banking stocks were up 3.69 per cent.

Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul index, which lost over 20 per cent of its value during the first three weeks of 2016, gained 6.7 per cent on opening and was trading up 2.7 per cent pre-close. However the value of energy and utilities stocks remained in the red.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos on Friday, the United Arab Emirates’ energy minister Suhail Al Mazrouei predicted that oil prices would stabilise at “a fair price for the producers and consumers” by early 2017.

Last week, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Ali al-Naimi also stressed that crude oil prices will stabilise and rise again, although he also warned that it might take some time.

The minister admitted that the oil market has been “undergoing a period of instability for more than 12 months now.”

“As you know, the oil market has witnessed over its long history periods of instability, severe price fluctuations and petro-economic cycles. This is one of them,” Naimi was quoted as saying in Riyadh.