Capital.com reports surge in UAE trading activity following Trump announcements

When Donald Trump speaks, retail traders in the UAE apparently don’t wait around to read the fine print. Capital.com’s Middle East CEO Tarik Chebib told Fortune that Trump’s political announcements trigger near-instant price swings and a measurable surge in trading activity across the platform, outpacing the market response to Federal Reserve decisions and major US economic data releases.

A new kind of market signal

Chebib, who has led Capital.com’s MENA operations since 2022, was direct about what the platform is seeing on the ground. “We see the price fluctuation immediately, and that will lead to trades,” he said. “We see that there’s more activity around those kinds of announcements.”

Capital.com reported record trading volumes in the MENA region for Q1 2025, crediting both rising local appetite for retail trading and the broader wave of global market volatility.

Why the Middle East is paying close attention

Chebib’s prior role as Head of Middle East at Pepperstone, another major retail trading platform, underscores how competitive the MENA brokerage landscape has become.

Capital Vault, an affiliate of Capital.com, received a UAE regulatory license to offer spot virtual asset services, meaning the firm is positioning itself to serve traders who want exposure to crypto alongside traditional asset classes under one regulated roof.

What comes next for politically-driven trading

Platforms benefit from volume regardless of which direction traders bet; individual traders bear the directional risk themselves.

What the Capital.com data ultimately illustrates is that the boundary between political news and financial markets has effectively dissolved for a new generation of active retail traders. In the UAE, at least, a Trump statement is now a tradeable event in the same category as an earnings release or a central bank meeting, just with considerably less advance notice.

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