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A lot of people talk about Dubai as a tech hub or a finance hub. To me it feels different. It’s Las Vegas in Arabia and the whole city is also a gated community. There is a camp, Regan-era Americana aesthetic. It’s like an early Bret Easton Ellis novel or Richard Gere in that famous 1980 movie. Lip injections and whitened teeth abound. You can envisage a 21st century Patrick Bateman slamming a modded Ferrari along the highway, blasting Ayo by Chris Brown, and looking out into the desert in wayfarers.
My problem is that….part of me kind of likes that stuff. And so if you enjoy the opening scene of Risky Business, with the Tangerine Dream soundtrack and the sunglasses pan out shot on Tom Cruise smoking a cigarette, then something about Dubai will appeal to you.
Alas, I was not there for Risky Business but a CFD expo.
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One of the things I often say is that this industry is like a conspiracy theory. When you know about it, you start seeing it everywhere. My first glimpse of online trading in Dubai was on the Emirates plane. I switched on Bad Boys IV and an ad started, with the narrator banging on about the capital cities with the fewest number of letters. Then it turned into an ad about Capital.com. The ad was clever, the movie not so much. The next film (Enemy at the Gates) had a CFI ad on it with Lewis Hamilton and trading charts.
I landed in Dubai Sunday evening and then went to get foul and hummus. Unfortunately, like many other great things in this world, hummus has been co-opted in the UK by Islington-types to make it seem more exotic and annoying than it is, when it should be something you get on the cheap from a roadside takeaway. Regardless, there is a place literally called ‘foul w hummus’ in Dubai near Mashreq station, so I arrived, put my bags in my hotel room, and then headed there on the metro.
At the moment, the entire metro ad space is plastered with ads for Equiti. Some were generic but a lot of them were focused on the company’s gold trading app, which was launched earlier this year. There is even a station just called ‘Equiti’, which made me laugh – imagine going past Chancery Lane on the Central Line and getting off at eToro. But then it fits with the Dubai vibe of ‘go big or go home’, plus it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t be effective – everyone must know who they are now.
The other company you see everywhere at the moment is CFI. Dubai sits on the coast and the metro runs in something like a straight line down the middle of the city, alongside a large highway. CFI ads weren’t on the metro but when you looked out of the carriage onto the highway, you could see Lewis Hamiltion’s face and the broker’s branding everywhere. After about 30 minutes, I reached hummus w foul, got my fill, and went back to the hotel. If you’re there then you should go. That place rules.
Expo
The Dubai Forex Expo is probably the biggest CFD industry event that I’ve been to before. It’s not on the same scale as ICE but it’s pushing in that direction. A lot of the attendees were retail, others were there for B2B stuff.
There were a couple of striking things. One was just how many firms were there. There were a handful with giant booths that I’d never even heard of. When you speak to people in Europe, they are often morose and give the impression this industry is done. You got the complete opposite attending this event – it even feels like a bubble.
The other interesting point was how many people there seemed to be doing business in India. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising given how much traffic some players are getting today from the country, but then there is always a difference between seeing something in person, as compared to viewing it on a screen.
Another factor was just how many people are now based in Dubai or are thinking of moving. One broker founder I spoke to is moving, probably next year. Another one is on the fence but is seriously considering it. This was quite a common pattern with other executives, particularly from the UK. Partly this is because of tax and people finding the lifestyle in Dubai attractive, partly it’s because Dubai increasingly feels like the centre of this industry.
In terms of other tidbits of information, Taurex is doing well in Asia and MENA. Hantec’s prop offering has taken off. And I also caught up with Scope Markets CEO Pavel Spirin. Scope recently launched trading on UAE indices and is (I believe) the first to do so.
“We were already offering UAE single stock CFDs,” said Spirin. “So this was a natural evolution of that. This is a unique product, so we were happy with the uptake from clients. What surprised us was the institutional demand. We only launched this recently but we have already had requests for these indices from other companies.”
Was the event good overall? I would say yes, most brokers I spoke to thought it was great. One firm I talked to got several hundred leads over two days. My only observation would be that there are potentially a lot of low value retail punters wandering around. Many of them had the plastic bag, worn out trainers with suit trousers, ‘take all the free giveaways’ aesthetic that is so common at small cap AGMs.
Other adventures
Aside from the expo, I also went to Century Financial’s office. Some of you will be familiar with Century. They were set up in the UAE back in 1989 and have historically been one of the largest introducers for other firms in the industry, although they are getting the licensing in place to strike out on their own.
“We don’t want to do what others are doing, we are different,” Executive Director Nadeem Khan told me. “People ask why we didn’t take a booth at the expo that was on this week. The answer is there is no point for us because we are not interested in offering the sorts of terms that clients at those events want.
“Our minimum deposit is $10,000. We want to offer a high touch, bespoke service to high quality clients and we have been doing that successfully for 35 years. We do a bit of marketing but most of our business now is just word of mouth, our clients refer their friends and business partners.”
The company has taken up an entire floor and has almost 250 people working for them in Dubai. Century also has a funds and wealth management offering, with one of the newly set up funds providing investors with access to the Indian markets. They’ve also just set up a B2B product for other financial institutions.
“The institutional offering was a natural step for us,” said Chief Product Officer Ulas Akincilar, who moved to Dubai earlier this year from the UK to join Century. “We’ve built a lot of good relationships on the liquidity side over the years, so we can give clients good pricing. I helped build the B2B offering at INFINOX and we’ve also brought in Svetlana [Kulikova], who has experience at MetaQuotes and other LPs. So we’ve got the relationships, we’ve got the personnel, now we’re starting to build the product.”
My next stop was at ATFX MENA HQ. Over the last 12 months, the company has made a few key hires. Hormoz Faryar joined last October from ADSS and Aditya Singh made the move earlier this year. More recently Amer Zino switched from Taurex, where he had been head of MENA, to be part of ATFX Connect – the brokerage group’s institutional division.
The best way I can describe ATFX MENA HQ is a feeling of happy and productive chaos. Singh was leaving for a meeting when I arrived. Raneem Dasoqe in the biz dev team wanted me to be an IB but kept getting distracted by more interesting (and profitable) endeavours. Zino was in a meeting with another company but kept running in and out to get Faryar. Two other people were filming a video with market updates in the middle of the office.
I had slept for about five hours and not eaten anything all day, so I spent a good chunk of my time there chowing down lamb kofta from Safadi and learning about how the Phoenicians invented everything from someone in compliance.
When I was done with that I then got to wander around the office. A few screens had the sales figures for the month to date, including deposit numbers. It was impressive stuff given we were only a week into October. However, I noticed that Sales Director Fadi Sader was conspicuously absent from the top five. What’s going on bro?
“I am not doing sales much directly myself,” Sader told me. “It is more managing the team. The screen is to motivate them. We don’t want or need to put pressure on them but it’s a reminder that we have a job to do.”
My final stop that day was to hang with the Afterprime crew. We spoke to Jeremy and Elan from there recently, so go listen to that if you want to hear what they’re up to. That evening I also met a company called Vanquish. These guys are based in the UK and have an interesting set up, with an education platform and a fund, as well as a regulatory umbrella for introducers. I haven’t seen an offering like that before so it’s worth checking out.
The whole world is changing
It’s probably for another outlet to write about it but at the moment today it feels like the whole world is changing. At least as it pertains to Dubai, the moment that both encapsulates this and sticks in my mind is leaving a nightclub one night in the early hours of the morning. In the lift with me was a guy with his girlfriend, who looked like Haifa Wehbe. She was also two sheets to the wind but kept saying ‘ya7ni I am ok ya7ni’.
I’m nosy so I asked where they were from. The answer? Saudi Arabia.
“So I guess the whole wahabi thing is over eh brother?’ I said. He laughed and agreed.
“Our king is getting rid of them all, one by one,” he replied. “We are building the country of the future.”
We walked out together but then parted ways. It was still humid and I had to walk through a station and then go along an overpass to get back to my hotel. When I had crossed it and come down on the other side, I looked back at the station building. A crane was plastering a giant advert on its side.
‘naqdi,’ the ad said, ‘TRADE WITH PURE STP BROKER’
Ya allah…
