The UAE was the single largest market on a major global trading platform in the first half of 2026, with 23,776 active clients placing 17.5 million trades worth $1.06 trillion between January and June.
That figure represented 43.5 per cent of all trading value on the platform during the period, according to the company’s Pulse Report, which covers 80.9 million closed trades across seven markets globally.
Gold dominated UAE client activity by a wide margin. At $569.6 billion across 9.4 million trades, it accounted for 54 per cent of total UAE trading value.
The US Tech 100 came second at $192.1 billion (18 per cent), followed by Germany’s DAX 40 at $56.3 billion (5 per cent), US crude oil at $50.8 billion (5 per cent), and the Wall Street 30 index at $44.9 billion (4 per cent).
Gold’s strong first half was supported by a series of price records in January, driven by central bank buying at its highest level in 25 years, a weaker US dollar, and sustained geopolitical pressure. Unlike other markets in the report, where interest shifted toward US technology stocks from May, UAE clients kept gold in first place throughout the half.
UAE clients also traded the highest values in individual shares of any market covered. Micron Technology topped the list at $717.6 million, more than double the largest single-share figure recorded in any other market. Tesla, SanDisk, SpaceX, and NVIDIA rounded out the top five.
The report also tracked stop-loss use, a risk management tool that automatically closes a trade when a price falls to a pre-set level. In the UAE, 18.30 per cent of trades had a stop-loss in place in H1 2026, up from 17.08 per cent in the second half of 2025.
When a stop-loss did close a position, the resulting loss was on average 40.8 per cent smaller than losses on positions without one, slightly above the platform-wide average of 39.0 per cent. The report notes that this is a pattern in the data and does not indicate that stop-loss orders cause better outcomes.
“The UAE is by far the largest market in this analysis, with around $1 trillion traded in the first half and more than half of that in gold. Stop-loss use rose to 18.3 per cent over the period, and because the market is so large, each step forward makes a real difference to the overall picture. Helping more traders set an exit before they trade is where we’re focusing,” Tarik Chebib, CEO MENA at Capital.com said in a statement.
The Pulse Report covers seven markets in detail: Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the UAE. The seven markets together accounted for roughly 40 per cent of all trades on the platform during the period.
