ADX trading floor promises to be as exciting as DFM

It was genuinely exciting to be at the DFM viewing platform, and hopefully that will be the case at the ADX at Sowwah Square before long.

I’ve never been invited to the viewing gallery of the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) before, but I had the privilege of mounting the glass staircase above Costa Coffee earlier this week.

Every proper exchange deserves a viewing gallery, even in the modern era of almost totally electronic trading, and even in the wood-panelled, normally sleepy environs of the DFM.

Standing on the spot where DFM grandees ring the bell for a new listing, the scene below was pretty lively. Maybe it was because the index is nudging the 5,000 level again, maybe because around about the time I was there, Arabtec, one of the biggest and most popular stocks on the market, briefly reached the dizzy heights of Dh8. There was lots of excited talk and bursts of cheering.

I was reminded of the old days on the London Stock Exchange, when it was in Throgmorton Street and had a proper viewing gallery, where financial journalists could go to watch market sentiment – live.

It was genuinely exciting to be at the DFM viewing platform, and only different in minor detail from the author Tom Wolfe’s famous description of a dealing floor in New York at the height of one of the booms: “Well-educated young white men baying for money.”

I was chatting with a DFM boss, obviously pleased with the impression the market had created on the day of a visit by a party of journalists, and I asked him: “But, have you seen the trading floor in Abu Dhabi, in the new global market?”

“No, have they got one there? I didn’t know that,” he replied, I think sincerely.

Well indeed they have got one in Sowwah Square, all brand spanking new, though with nobody in it yet. The ticker tapes around the walls are, as yet, bare, the booths unoccupied, but it cannot be too long until there is some action there.

One of the things that got the DFM trading floor going was news that Arabtec was going ahead with its massive project in St Petersburg, where there had been speculation that sanctions against Russia over the Ukrainian troubles would cause the DFM-listed (but Abu Dhabi-owned) company to pull out.

It’s not true, said Arabtec, and I think you’ve got to give them credit. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of what’s going on in Ukraine, it’s hard to see how a unilateral action by a UAE company would advance the cause of peace or freedom there one bit.

Arabtec obviously believes there is still life and vibrancy in the Russian market. To judge by an evening I had recently at the Tchaikovsky restaurant in Dubai Marina’s Byblos Hotel, the company is 100 per cent right.

This place had been recommended to me by a Kazakh friend who knows the former Soviet scene in Dubai pretty well. He said it was better than my hitherto-favourite Russian eatery in Dubai, the Bolshoi restaurant in the Moscow Hotel in Deira, of which I have written before.

He was dead right. What an evening: that incredible mix of schmaltz and glam only Russians – and maybe the Irish – can do so well. The floor show, an eclectic mix of boas, national dress and Brazilian carnival, was a knockout.

The food and beverage were excellent too. My mind was still reeling as I strolled home along Marina Walk, with the Russian folk-tune “kalinka” whirling in my ears.

Now for the ultimate test. What will Mrs Kane, who hails from former-Soviet Azerbaijan herself, think about it?

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