EGX30 sheds 4.43% in October to post its first back-to-back monthly loss of 2026

The EGX30 closed October down 4.43% at 49.6k points, its second losing month in a row and the benchmark’s first back-to-back losses this year, according to the bourse’s monthly report (pdf). March, June, and September also closed in the red. The index opened the month at 51.9k, climbed as high as 54.1k, and bottomed at 47.9k — an 11.4% peak-to-trough swing inside four weeks, by our math. The only index on the board to finish green was the EGX T-Bonds, up 0.88% to 2.7k, and only the food, beverages, and tobacco sector held the line, finishing up 0.2%.

Further down the market, the losses ran about twice as deep. The EGX70 dropped 9.91% to 16.8k points, and the broader EGX100 lost 8.62% to 22.6k. Tamayuz, the SME gauge, fell 6.33% to 38.1k. The low-volatility EGX35-LV shed 8.32% to 5.8k, while the EGX33 Shariah index lost 5.57% to 5.9k. These are high-beta companies that are more exposed to retail trading and swings in investor sentiment than their EGX30 counterparts, Menthum co-founder and CEO Himanshu Shrimali tells EnterpriseAM.

ICYMI- The exchange suspended trading for 30 minutes on Sunday, 25 October after the EGX100 breached its circuit-breaker threshold, the first market-wide halt since October 2021. The EGX70 fell 11.07% in that session alone and the EGX100 8.88%, against 3.56% for the benchmark. The pressure had been building before the halt, with fund managers selling to unlock liquidity for the MNT-Halan and Banque du Caire offerings and the pipeline behind them.

“October was a confidence correction, not a fundamental one,” Okaz Asset Management’s Randa Hamed tells EnterpriseAM. The net selling came from institutions, mostly foreign, and landed on the blue chips, but the disorder was further down the market. “The panic was in the small- and mid-caps,” she says, where retail dominates trading. That showed in how urgently people sold and in how fast and how far prices moved in retail-heavy names, Hamed says, while the month’s data shows retail investors stayed in the market.

Shrimali is calmer about October — yet worried about what’s yet to follow — describing the pullback as a healthy pause for the market. He points out that the selloff was hardly unique to Egypt, with global pressures compounded at home by geopolitical tensions and currency strain. On the other hand, he’s more concerned about what comes next: “What happened in October is not as important or significant as compared to what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks.”

What would turn it around: Shrimali sees the EGP’s slide — 20% since March and 10% since September, by his numbers — working as a tailwind for equities in 6-12 months. On his read, a cheaper EGP lifts nominal prices and widens margins. The risk he’s watching sits outside Egypt: global money taking “a pause from the AI trade” or losing patience with fiscal deficits.

ZOOMING OUT- Shrimali’s point holds across the region: Abu Dhabi’s ADX fell 6% in October, its worst month since March, Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul shed roughly 5%, and Dubai’s DFM slipped 3.2%, putting the EGX30 squarely mid-pack in a GCC-wide selloff.

Selling without conviction

Total value traded came in at EGP 2.5 tn, up 5.9% from September, with all of the increase coming from the debt side. Bonds and bills traded EGP 2.3 tn, up 9.4% m-o-m, and took 91.6% of total market turnover. Listed stocks (including SMEs) managed EGP 211.0 bn, down 20.9% from September’s EGP 266.7 bn, and accounted for 8.4% of the total. Meanwhile, total volume traded fell 16.7% to 53.29 bn securities, with transactions dropping 20.9% to 4.82 mn.

Market cap followed prices down, falling 4.04% to EGP 3.9 tn and erasing some EGP 163.8 bn over the month, while the SME board lost 6.8% to EGP 3.4 bn. Paid-in capital moved the other way, rising 4.2% to EGP 627.7 bn as Export Development Bank of Egypt, Orascom Development Egypt, and Delta for Printing & Packaging all issued bonus shares into the decline. The market ended October on a trailing P/E of 17.36 and a dividend yield of 4.03%.

Hamed reads the drop in activity as constructive: a falling market on thin turnover means the selling never gathered much conviction, and it would have taken heavy volume on the way down to signal a real selloff. “First, turnover fell about 21% from September. This is a positive indicator,” she says. The same test runs in reverse: a rally without volume behind it is the one she would question, because it tends not to hold.

SOUND SMART- Trading intensity, or turnover divided by market cap, has run at almost 75% this year, against 20–30% for most of the past decade and roughly 35% in 2025, Shrimali says. In the US and India, that ratio leans on algo and options trading, but neither operates at size on the EGX, where freefloats are thin, so it’s retail carrying the market.

The worst-hit sectors

The selling reached almost every corner of the market, with 15 of the 16 sectoral indices closing red. Textiles and durables was the worst, shedding 14.5%, followed by industrial goods, services, and automobiles (-11.5%), travel and leisure (-10.0%), real estate (-9.4%), healthcare and pharma (-9.0%), and trade and distributors (-8.3%). Non-bank financial services fell 7.2%, followed by contracting and construction engineering (-5.9%), IT, media, and communication services (-5.8%), and education services (-5.7%). Banks, the exchange’s largest sector weight at 23.4% of market cap, fell 5.0%. The valuation gap is just as wide: banks closed the month on a trailing P/E of 5.05x, against 23.49x for healthcare and 47.84x for education, by the bourse’s sector table. Shrimali reads the banks as cheap against their returns — and education as too thin a sector for the multiple to say much.

The shallowest losses were in energy and support services as well as building materials, both dipping 0.9%, with shipping and transportation services down 2.3%.

Institutions sold, retail bought

Under all that, institutions and retail traded in opposite directions. Excluding block trades, institutions were net sellers of EGP 4.14 bn of listed stock and retail investors net buyers of the same amount. Retail accounted for 74.9% of open-market turnover against 25.1% for institutions, by our math. Egyptian retail did most of the buying, at a net EGP 4.03 bn.

And a lot of that buying likely came from retail’s most stretched investors. Almost half of the investors in Menthum’s community poll had borrowed through buy-now-pay-later providers, including Valu, to buy stocks, Shrimali notes. He says a large number of the retail army are “heavily leveraged,” paying interest of up to 50% to chase returns. That leaves them no spare capital to fund a recovery as the bills they borrowed against come due. That leaves the next leg to institutions, foreigners, or high-net-worth investors, none of them big players on the EGX today, he says.

Non-locals sold, again

Split by nationality, local investors made up 88.7% of value traded in listed stocks excluding block trades, with foreigners at 8.6% and regional investors at 2.7%. Foreigners were net sellers of EGP 2.3 bn over the month, and regional investors were net sellers of EGP 588.9 mn. “Concentrated foreign selling was almost all of it in banks, which is contrary to what was expected considering the IPO of Banque du Caire was expected to buoy the sector,” Hamed tells us.

The YTD picture points the same way: Local investors have taken 88.3% of value traded excluding block trades since January, foreigners 7.7%, and regional investors 4.0%, with foreigners net sellers of EGP 13.5 bn and regional investors net sellers of EGP 10.6 bn across the 10 months.

The brokerages league table

In October: Thndr topped the monthly brokerage league table (pdf) with a 17.4% market share, followed by Commercial International Brokerage Company (CIBC) at 15.9% and EFG Hermes’s combined brokerage arms at 14.3%.

YTD- Thndr leads the YTD rankings (pdf) with a 16.6% market share, followed by EFG Hermes’s combined arms at 12.9% and CIBC at 5.9%.