Economy & Aid
Palestine Exchange lifts the Al-Quds index above 700 for the first time
Image credit: Palestine Trade Tower, Ramallah — Mohammad Hijjawi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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The Palestine Exchange in Nablus closed its Al-Quds index on Thursday at 702.42 points, up 9.07 points or 1.31 per cent on Wednesday's close of 693.35 and the first settlement above 700 in the index's fifty-two-week record.
The session ran between 692.96 and 702.42 and finished at its own high, according to the market data on Investing.com's Al-Quds quote page after the close. The Palestine Exchange trades Sunday to Thursday, so Thursday's figure is a settled close and the week's last.
The gain extends a run this paper has followed session by session. The index closed at 646.15 on 2 August, at 683.33 on 27 August, at 693.32 on 1 September, and now sits about 31 per cent above its level a year ago. Its fifty-two-week range is 523.61 to 702.42.
What a round number measures#
The Al-Quds index tracks the exchange's largest listed companies by market value, led by Bank of Palestine, the Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO) and the telecoms group Paltel, priced in Jordanian dinars. Daily turnover in recent sessions has run below a million dollars, so a single large order in one bank stock can move the index a full point.
That thinness is the caveat this paper attaches to every record. A market of forty-seven listings measures a small pool of listed assets held largely by Palestinian institutions and diaspora investors. It does not measure Palestinian incomes, which the World Bank and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics have both reported falling through the war, nor the public sector's salary arrears.
This paper could not read the exchange's own session bulletin on Thursday: the Palestine Exchange's website continues to return an access error to automated clients, and its Arabic session reports reach the local wires with a delay of days. The figures above rest on the Investing.com quote page alone.
The next session opens on Sunday 6 September, and this paper's markets strip will carry the 702.42 close, dated, until it does.
