# Gulf Traders Now Move on Trump's Words Faster Than on Fed Decisions > UAE retail investors are reacting to Trump's statements within moments, part of a broader boom that saw Dubai's exchange jump 40% and the Middle East account for more than half of Capital.com's global trading volume in the second quarter. - Source: Foreign Time - Canonical URL: https://foreigntime.com/article/uae-traders-instant-reactions-trump-statements-gulf-markets - Author: Foreign Time Newsroom - Section: Trade - Published: 2026-08-26T09:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-26T09:00:00.000Z - Tags: Trade, UAE, United States, Markets, Donald Trump --- Traders across the UAE have started reacting to Donald Trump's public statements almost the moment they land, a shift that is reshaping the region's retail trading markets, according to Fortune's Dubai-based correspondent Inzamam Rashid. "We see the price fluctuation immediately, and that will lead to trades," Tarik Chebib, Middle East CEO of trading platform Capital.com, told Fortune. "We see that there's more activity around those kinds of announcements." Vijay Valecha, chief investment officer at Dubai-based Century Financial, said the pattern isn't confined to one brokerage: activity around Trump's statements now outstrips what Federal Open Market Committee decisions, CPI releases, or U.S. jobless numbers typically generate. The reaction is landing on a market that is already accelerating fast enough to challenge established financial hubs. The Dubai Financial Market's trading value rose 40 percent year-on-year to $32.5 billion in the first half of 2026, while Abu Dhabi's exchange saw $46.6 billion in trades over the same period. On Capital.com alone, the Middle East accounted for 57 percent of the platform's $1.13 trillion in global client trading volume in the second quarter of 2026, most of it from the UAE. Average trade size on the platform rose 16 percent to $32,418 even as the total number of trades fell 23.2 percent, evidence, Chebib said, that Middle Eastern clients favor heavier leverage and "huge positions," particularly in commodities. Gold has anchored much of that activity, accounting for 49.9 percent of Middle East volume on Capital.com versus 42.4 percent globally, followed by the U.S. Tech 100 at 23.5 percent and WTI crude at 7.3 percent. But the focus has moved with the year's headlines: gold dominated early on before the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz pulled attention toward oil, and traders have since rotated into AI-related equities and U.S. indices as tech stocks recovered. "This year, it was the war that was the catalyst," Chebib said. Valecha said Century Financial logged its highest-ever volumes in the first week of March as investors scrambled to respond to the conflict: "The panic makes people trade. A lot of people jumped into gold. A lot of people jumped into oil." The UAE's rise as a retail trading hub predates this year's war, though. Investment Trends counted 49,000 active leverage traders in the country in 2023, up 9 percent year-on-year and, at the time, ahead of comparable counts in Singapore, Spain, and France; a more recent estimate put 48,000 people placing at least one CFD or forex trade in the 12 months to April 2025, versus 38,000 in Singapore. "The UAE specifically is now as big as Singapore when it comes to retail trading," Chebib said, noting that brokerage accounts were barely part of everyday financial life when he arrived in the region 11 years ago. Valecha attributes the shift to an investor base that skews younger, more affluent, and more comfortable with leveraged products than in comparable markets. The speed of the boom has invited scrutiny of its own. "From the outside it might look suspicious," Valecha acknowledged. "Any country that grows at the speed at which the UAE grows, at the speed at which Dubai grows, it does look suspicious." But he pushed back on the idea that anything irregular is driving the numbers, calling it instead "highly reactive retail trading" driven by news flow, and pointed to the buildout of regulated financial centers like the Dubai International Financial Centre and Abu Dhabi Global Market, plus the UAE's removal from the Financial Action Task Force's grey list in 2024, as what actually opened the door to faster capital movement. "It's just brilliant execution," he said. Chebib said he has seen no evidence of suspicious activity at Capital.com, which is predominantly a retail rather than institutional platform. A significant share of the money moving through the region is landing in American assets: investors across the six Gulf Cooperation Council states held about $891 billion in U.S. equities as of June 2025, part of nearly $1.3 trillion held in U.S. securities overall, according to Treasury data, with Nasdaq and S&P 500 products remaining heavily traded and AI stocks emerging as a dominant theme in the back half of the year. With U.S. midterm elections still ahead, Chebib expects another burst of volatility tied to Trump's statements, and said that if the first eight months of 2026 are any guide, Capital.com could be headed for a record year. --- Originally published by Foreign Time. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://foreigntime.com/article/uae-traders-instant-reactions-trump-statements-gulf-markets.