Dubai: Facebook isn’t just active on most people’s smartphones, but on their investment portfolios as well.
A study conducted among stock investors across the GCC, which include business owners and professional traders, indicated that people who invest in stocks choose to put their money in overseas firms like Facebook.
The social media platform, which reportedly has 82 million users in the Arab world, emerged as the most recently traded stock on Saxo Bank’s platform during the first quarter of 2016.
The other popular stocks were Bank of America, Apple, Halliburton Co and Alphabet Inc., a US-based multinational organisation created in 2015 as Google’s parent company.
Fadi Mehdi, head of Saxo Bank’s Abu Dhabi representative office, said it is not surprising to see Facebook and Apple in the investment portfolio of their clients in the GCC, given that these two companies showed “solid” performance last year.
Facebook’s revenues for the full year 2015 increased by 44 per cent to $17.93 billion. Apple posted a quarterly revenue of $75.9 billion and a quarterly net profit of $18.4 billion for its fiscal 2016 fourth quarter ended December 26, 2015.
"I am not surprised to see that Facebook and Apple are in the top most popular stocks. The companies demonstrated solid performances last year, and investors have continued to buy. However, we have seen some correction in the market. The tech companies are at the battlefront of the new economy and there are strong opinions on the current pricing," added Fadi.
Saxo Bank, however, did not disclose the number of stock investors covered in the survey. The bank’s clients across the GCC are quite diverse, with many of them working as full time or professional traders.
“But we also see a large portion of the retail traders trade the financial markets in addition to their full-time careers. Of those clients who have a separate career, about one-third of them are business owners. The majority of the clients are based in the GCC, but increasingly, we are seeing interest from traders in Saudi Arabi, Bahrain and Qatar,” Mehdi told Gulf News.
