“We see the price fluctuation immediately, and that will lead to trades,” Tarik Chebib, the Middle East CEO of trading platform Capital.com, told Fortune. “We see that there’s more activity around those kinds of announcements.”

The reaction comes as trading activity across the UAE accelerates, positioning the country as a serious challenger to more established financial hubs. In the first half of 2026, the Dubai Financial Market’s trading value soared 40% year-on-year to $32.5 billion, while Abu Dhabi’s exchange saw $46.6 billion in trades. At the same time, retail investors are placing ever-larger leveraged bets on gold, oil, and U.S. technology stocks.

On Capital.com alone, the Middle East accounted for 57% of the platform’s $1.13 trillion in global client trading volume during the second quarter of 2026, with the majority coming from the UAE.

Vijay Valecha, chief investment officer at Dubai-based Century Financial, said the pattern extends beyond one brokerage. “As soon as there’s any kind of announcement coming from the White House or President Trump, we see activity increasing immediately,” he added. Valecha said activity around Trump’s statements now exceeds that generated by Federal Open Market Committee decisions, CPI releases or U.S. jobless numbers.

Leverage among UAE investors has also increased numerous times since Trump returned to office, according to Valecha, as repeated market rebounds after relatively shallow corrections have emboldened traders.

“As soon as there’s any kind of announcement coming from the White House or President Trump, we see activity increasing immediately”

Vijay Valecha, chief investment officer at Century Financial

The Middle East accounted for 57.2% of Capital.com’s global platform volume in the second quarter of 2026. Across the platform, average trade size rose 16% to $32,418 from $27,950 in Q1, even as the number of trades fell 23.2% to 34.9 million.

Chebib said Middle Eastern clients tend to use more leverage and take “huge positions,” particularly in commodities. 

Gold has been at the center of the activity. Capital.com recorded $1.13 trillion of client trading volume globally in Q2, with gold accounting for 42.4%. In the Middle East, gold represented 49.9% of volume, followed by the U.S. Tech 100 at 23.5% and WTI crude at 7.3%.

The market’s focus has shifted rapidly, with gold dominating early in the year before conflict and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz drew attention to oil. Investors then rotated into AI-related equities and U.S. indices as technology stocks recovered. “This year, it was the war that was the catalyst,” Chebib said, as investors have sought to capitalize on the market volatility the conflict has caused. 

Valecha said Century Financial recorded its highest volumes in the first week of March as investors scrambled to respond to the conflict. “The panic makes people trade,” he said. “A lot of people jumped into gold. A lot of people jumped into oil.”

But the UAE’s rise as a retail trading center predates this year’s war. Investment trends counted 49,000 active leverage traders in the country in 2023, up 9% from the previous year and, at the time, ahead of comparable counts for Singapore, Spain and France. Valecha believes the UAE has an investor base that is younger, more affluent and accustomed to leveraged products.

The speed and scale of the boom have also prompted questions over whether some of the activity could be unusual or suspicious. “From the outside it might look suspicious,” Valecha said. “Any country that grows at the speed at which the UAE grows, at the speed at which Dubai grows, it does look suspicious.”

But Valecha rejected the suggestion that unusual trading was behind the surge, describing it instead as “highly reactive retail trading” driven by news. 

He pointed to the expansion of regulated financial firms, the development of financial centers including the Dubai International Financial Centre and Abu Dhabi Global Market, and the UAE’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list in 2024, which he said made it easier for capital to move into the country. “It’s just brilliant execution,” he said. Chebib similarly said he had not seen evidence of suspicious activity at Capital.com, which is predominantly a retail rather than institutional business.

The increased interest in trading is part of a broader change as the UAE transforms from a relatively small retail market into one that executives say now competes with established financial centers. Investment Trends estimates that 48,000 people in the country placed at least one CFD or foreign-exchange in the 12 months to April 2025, compared with 38,000 active traders in Singapore. “The UAE specifically is now as big as Singapore when it comes to retail trading,” Chebib said, noting that brokerage accounts were rarely part of everyday financial life when he arrived in the region 11 years ago. 

“Any country that grows at the speed at which the UAE grows, at the speed at which Dubai grows, it does look suspicious”

Vijay Valecha

A substantial share of Middle Eastern money is flowing into American assets. Investors across the six GCC states held about $891 billion in US equities as of June 2025, according to Treasury data, part of nearly $1.3 trillion they held in U.S securities overall. Nasdaq and S&P 500 products remain heavily traded, while AI stocks have become a dominant theme in the second half of the year.

And with U.S. midterm elections still ahead, Chebib expects another burst of volatility. If the first eight months are any guide, he said, Capital.com could be heading for a record year.