Economy & Aid
Palestine's Al-Quds index gains nearly five per cent this August
Image credit: Palestine Trade Tower, Ramallah — Mohammad Hijjawi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
Original Reporting
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The Palestine Exchange closed its Sunday session with the Al-Quds index at 676.70 points, a gain of nearly five per cent since the start of August and within two points of its highest level in a year.
The index opened the month at 646.15 points on 2 August. It has climbed almost without interruption since: 664.06 on 9 August, 675.12 on 12 August, then a fortnight of small retreats and recoveries — 673.70, 672.43, 670.48, 673.50 — before Sunday's close. Monday's session was trading a little below that level on Investing.com's delayed quote as this was written.
Those are the exchange's own closes, read from the Al-Quds quote page and from the Arabic wire's session reports on raya.ps. The Palestine Exchange, which trades from Nablus on Sundays through Thursdays, publishes no public data interface, so each level has to be taken from a dated session report.
The index's range over the past twelve months, on the same quote page, runs from 523.61 to 678.45. Sunday's close sits near the top of that band without reaching its high.
What the number is built on#
The size of the market matters more than the direction of the index, and it is very small.
On 4 August the exchange turned over $991,178 across 474,552 shares in 55 transactions, according to the session report carried by the Arabic wire — and 76 per cent of that liquidity sat in a single stock, Badico, moved through off-exchange transfers rather than ordinary trading. Of eleven companies traded that day, one rose, four fell and six did not move at all.
A week earlier, on 28 July, the whole session came to $337,144 across 228,086 shares in 58 transactions, with the Palestinian Islamic Bank accounting for a third of it.
A session in which one stock is three-quarters of the turnover, moved off-exchange, is a thin market putting a price on a few names — not a broad market pricing an economy.
The exchange lists 47 companies. On the days above, between eleven and sixteen of them traded.
What it does and does not measure#
The Al-Quds index measures what buyers will pay for shares in a small group of listed Palestinian firms — Bank of Palestine, PADICO, PALTEL, the Palestinian Islamic Bank and their peers. Those companies are among the very few Palestinian institutions that publish audited accounts and carry a public price, which is precisely why the index is worth watching.
It is not a reading of the Palestinian economy. Gaza's private sector, most of which no longer exists in any form a share price could capture, is not in it.
Neither is the West Bank's fiscal crisis, nor the clearance revenues Israel collects on the Authority's behalf and withholds, nor the wage arrears that shape household income for tens of thousands of families. An index can rise while all of that gets worse, and this year it has.
The wire reported in mid-June that the index had regained its pre-war levels, when it stood near 659 points, without publishing the benchmark it measured against. It is now some seventeen points above that.
Times of Palestine reports market levels as facts, dated and attributed to the session that produced them. Nothing here is advice, and this newspaper does not tell readers to buy or sell anything.
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