The Baghdad Stock Market

It’s only open four hours a week, and there are just 100 stocks to buy, but the Baghdad Stock Exchange is open for business.

The trading floor works the old-fashioned way — with bids taken on pieces of paper, the numbers written on a board with magic marker.
In another unlikely twist, nearly half of the traders are young women. None of them wanted to talk to CBS News – because they were too busy.
The stock market is being touted as one of post-war Iraq’s few success stories.
Amazingly, one of the hottest areas of speculation is hotels and tourism. In a place like Iraq, this would surely fall into the futures category — long futures. And don’t even ask about the risk factor.
“I buy them because they are real-estate and building on very good land, so they are cheap price, so I buy them and I wait,” says Abdul Latif, one of the traders who figures hotels are as good a place as any to try his luck.

Posted by on May 9th, 2006 at 7:40 am


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