What's Been Happening With the Iranian Stock Market

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Tracy Alloway (0:55)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:00)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Joe, have you looked at the Taran Stock Exchange recently?

Joe Weisenthal (1:05)

I have not. Let me look that up right now.

Tracy Alloway (1:10)

I know what's gonna happen.

Joe Weisenthal (1:11)

Oh, nope, I can't find any data for it.

Tracy Alloway (1:13)

Yeah, we have actually recorded.

Joe Weisenthal (1:16)

Do you know what happens when you look on the Bloomberg?

Tracy Alloway (1:20)

Do you get a warning? I bet you do.

Joe Weisenthal (1:22)

Yeah, so if you're on the Bloomberg terminal, and you wanna see what's happening on the Tehran Stock Exchange, you actually get a red bar, and it said sanctions may apply to this instrument, and you can't get the data.

Tracy Alloway (1:33)

Yeah, that's exactly right. And we have actually done an episode on Iranian stocks before.

And one of the reasons this particular market is interesting is because it has to be the most unfamiliar equity market out there, I think, for the vast majority of investors. Because of sanctions, you can't access data on it. You're not gonna see a lot of news stories on what's going on with Iranian stocks. It's just really hard to get a sense at any single point in time of what this market is doing, what it's comprised of, and basically any information on it at all.

Joe Weisenthal (2:13)

That's right. It's very strange. It exists. There are plenty of stocks on it. It's always sort of interesting, I guess, to be reminded that stock markets exist in all these far-flung locations. Iran, of course, is a relatively big middle-income country, but because of the sanctions, it's just so unplugged into the Western financial system, you never, it just doesn't even come up in any conversation. I mean, you hear much more about, say, the Saudi market or something like that.

Tracy Alloway (2:39)

Absolutely. And I'm always kind of surprised when I read the numbers behind how big the Iranian economy actually is, because again, it's just one that people don't really talk about that much, except maybe in the context of oil exports. But anyway, as I mentioned, we did an episode on the Iranian stock market a couple years ago, and obviously Iran is back in the news. There's always been a degree of geopolitical risk in this market for obvious reasons.

We already mentioned sanctions, but geopolitical risk has just kicked into high gear, given the conflict between Israel and Hamas. And so I thought it might be interesting to bring back our guest and just try to take a look at what's happening in this extremely unfamiliar and sort of opaque market.

Joe Weisenthal (3:30)

That's right. And obviously right prior to the start of the war, obviously there had been talk, and we talked about this with Gregory Brew actually, there had been this easing, not of the sanctions, but it seemed of the enforcement of the sanctions.

And so a lot of Iranian oil has been flowing out of the country despite the sanctions. And of course, there was that money that the Biden administration had unfrozen and then since refrozen. And so there had been some macro moves happening in Iran. Whatever trajectory Iran may have been on is probably on something different now.

Tracy Alloway (4:07)

Absolutely. So we are going to be speaking with our previous guest. It's Maciej Wojtal. Maciej Wojtal, he is an investor in Iranian stocks. In fact, I think he's the only or he runs the only foreign institutional investor that is actually investing in Iran. So again, not a very crowded market and certainly an unusual one. Maciej, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

So maybe just to begin with, you could sort of give us a reminder of what it is that you and your fund actually do.