Bourses in the region broadly ended last month close to the flat line

May was a broadly muted month for the region’s exchanges as continued disruption from the Strait of Hormuz and a shortened trading calendar thanks to Eid Al Adha weighed on markets. With roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG still routed through a stalled corridor, equities spent the month trading less on domestic fundamentals than on the headlines coming out of the region.

The result: A cluster of indices that finished close to flat. Bahrain (+0.2%) and Qatar (+0.1%) essentially treaded water, while Casablanca (+1.6%), Egypt (+1.7%), and Kuwait (+1.1%) eked out modest gains. The fewer trading sessions on either side of the Eid break only thinned the volumes that might otherwise have given the month more direction.

The two outliers on the upside sat well clear of the pack: Tunisia’s Tunindex led the region, gaining 9.4% and extending a run that has made it one of 2026’s standout performers. Tunindex is up 34.5% YTD, powered by financials and a domestic largely insulated from the oil-and-Hormuz narrative dominating the Gulf. Jordan was the next strongest, with the Amman bourse riding similar momentum that brought it up 4.4% last month.

At the other end, ADX (-0.9%) and DFM (-0.4%) finished in the red — a notable reversal for two markets that had led GCC gains earlier in the year before war risk and the supply shock began eating into valuations. The UAE’s heavily real-estate-and-financials-weighted indices proved more exposed to the regional risk premium than to any upside from firmer crude, leaving them as the month’s laggards even as oil-leveraged names elsewhere rallied.

Saudi Arabia captured the month’s split personality. TASI closed the month exactly where it started, ending May down a slim 0.55%. The flat headline hides an unusually messy story underneath: Oil-leveraged cyclicals ripped higher, while the banks that usually anchor the index were dumped.

“You had roughly half the market behaving like a commodity derivative and the other half quietly doing its job,” Aseel Al Aranki, research and analysis department manager at River Prime, tells EnterpriseAM. With some 10.5 mn bbl / d of regional production shut in, she added, “you’re no longer just watching oil. You’re watching whether missiles land near Saudi infrastructure.”