Lots More on What's Going On in Iran's Markets

Iran is a huge country with a sizable stock market. And yet, years of sanctions and other restrictions mean it’s tough to even look up its stock prices (much less invest there.) In this episode, we catch up with Maciej Wojtal, CEO and CIO of AmtelonCapital, an Amsterdam-based fund that specializes in Iranian stocks. We talk about what the past week has been like for the market, what he’s hearing from people on the ground in Tehran, plus disruptions to businesses and oil. We talk about how Iranian investors handle major geopolitical risk and the outlook from here. Read more: Iran’s Khamenei Says US Intervention in War Achieved Nothing Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 0:58Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:39Speaker 02

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• 2:13Speaker 03

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:22Tracy Alloway?

  Anyway.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  It's a typical Polish name and it's a difficult one and there was no English equivalent.

• 2:27Joe Weisenthal?

  My mother speaks like nine languages. So, and she was a linguist and she said she found Polish to be the hardest. And she even like speaks like some like she's learned like some Russian and some Malay and all this.

• 2:39Tracy Alloway?

  Russian's supposed to be the hardest.

• 2:41Joe Weisenthal?

  And she said from a pronunciation standpoint, she found Polish to be the hardest. Anyway. Much bojto.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:50Joe Weisenthal?

  I did a dead list.

• 2:50Tracy Alloway?

  I am both the most popular trader and most successful trader at Citadel.

• 2:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Fed is going viral.

• 2:56Tracy Alloway?

  Uh, barges.

• 2:57Joe Weisenthal?

  This is an after school special, except.

• 2:59Tracy Alloway?

  I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.

• 3:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Black gold.

• 3:06Tracy Alloway?

  These are the important questions. Is it robots taking over the world?

• 3:09Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the odd lots podcast. One day that person will have the mandate of heaven.

• 3:19Tracy Alloway?

  How do I get more popular and successful?

• 3:21Joe Weisenthal?

  We do have. The perfect guest. Welcome to lots more where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now.

• 3:29Tracy Alloway?

  Because even when odd lots is over, there's always lots more.

• 3:33Joe Weisenthal?

  And we really do have the perfect guest.

• 3:38Tracy Alloway?

  One thing we have learned in all our episodes, looking at the Iranian stock market, and there have been a couple.

• 3:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 3:45Tracy Alloway?

  But one thing we've learned is that Iran is actually the 37th biggest economy in the world by nominal GDP. Can you guess like another economy that is roughly that size?

• 3:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's a really, so what is roughly similar to the Iranian? I don't know. Go on.

• 4:04Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. Well, one of them is Denmark. So, you know, that's pretty big. But then when you start looking at things like geographical size, Iran is, I think, the 17th biggest country in the world by geographical size. It has a lot of people as well. So, you know, similar to Turkey in terms of population.

• 4:21Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I know the population now.

• 4:23Tracy Alloway?

  Oh.

• 4:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, yeah, because Ted Cruz got stumped on it when he went on Tucker Carlson's show. So we all know that Iran. Has a population of around 90 million.

• 4:32Tracy Alloway?

  Should have listened to Oddlog.

• 4:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No one, yeah, he should have. No one is ever going to make that mistake again in public.

• 4:36Tracy Alloway?

  That's right. That should have been my first question.

• 4:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I say something? When there's geopolitical events happening in the world on a weekend when nothing is trading. So one, you can look at what crypto is doing.

• 4:47Tracy Alloway?

  Yep.

• 4:47Joe Weisenthal?

  But every once in a while, when I'm in true market sicko mood, like I'll actually check like, oh, what is the Saudi market doing on a Saturday? Or what is the Tel Aviv market doing on a Sunday?

• 4:57Tracy Alloway?

  That's not sicko mode. That's just being international.

• 5:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, we're supposed to have the weekends to not be looking up. But most of the time, they're not. Every point is everyone's in a while. I'm like, oh, I'm going to check in and see how Tel Aviv is trading on a Sunday or something like that.

• 5:11Tracy Alloway?

  You could look at currency markets.

• 5:13Joe Weisenthal?

  That's how you know something is happening.

• 5:14Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, but the one market that you can't really look up.

• 5:17Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 5:17Tracy Alloway?

  Is Iran's stock market and the Tehran Stock Exchange specifically, which again, as we know from previous episodes, has more than 600 companies and is worth, I think it was almost $100 billion. I don't know if it's still that much, but I'm always really.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  It's around $150 billion.

• 5:34Tracy Alloway?

  150? Oh, wow. Okay. We're speaking with Matia Voital. He is CEO and CIO of Antilon Capital, which is an Amsterdam-based fund manager, which specializes in Iranian stocks. He's been on the show a couple of times before and we thought we would talk to him again just to try to get a sense of what's going on in terms of Iran's economy and its stock market.

• 5:57Joe Weisenthal?

  What is going on?

• 5:57Speaker 04

  If I can just comment on one thing.

• 5:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Please.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  The way you introduced Iran is the perfect way to show the country. It's the size of Turkey in terms of population and actually geographical size as well. But if you compare the economy of Turkey and Iran, it's around five times smaller. So Iran is around five times smaller. And if you look at the composition of the economy, Turkey has no natural resources. So they have to import the whole energy commodities they consume and so on. Iran has a similar size of potential non-commodity GDP that it could grow to. So from the current, let's say, 250 billion to 1.1 trillion GDP that Turkey has. But also. On top of this has resources that are actually, if you combine gas and oil,

• 6:45Speaker 04

  they are bigger than Saudi Arabia's and Saudi Arabia is another 1.3 trillion dollar economy. So this is a good way to just frame Iran as to show Iran as, you know, it's a big country that should really be having much bigger economy because of sanctions, various reasons and so on. It's been underdeveloped, but the scale of this underdevelopment is like 10x.

• 7:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 7:09Tracy Alloway?

  And because of the sanctions, we can't actually go and look up what's happening in Tehran's stock market. So why don't you give us an overview of what it's been like for the past week, given geopolitical events?

• 7:21Speaker 04

  So for the past week, it was difficult for everyone to to check what was going on in Iran because internet was shut down, basically. So I could communicate with my team on the ground in Tehran once a day when they had signal and sometimes it was WhatsApp that was working, sometimes Telegram, but it was maybe once or twice per day. So what was going on in the market was simply nothing. So the stock market hasn't opened. The exchange of fire between Iran and Israel happened on a Friday, which is weekend in Iran. And then on the following Saturday, there was an important religious holiday. So the market and actually the whole economy was supposed to be closed anyway. The economic activity,

• 8:03Speaker 04

  the market was supposed to resume on a Sunday, but they didn't open. So, so, so, so, so the market, the stock market, pretty much most of the currency market has been closed for the last two weeks.

• 8:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Zooming out for a second. Actually, there are two really things that strike me. One, this is true frontier market investing when you're in a position in which you literally cannot easily communicate with your team on the ground because there are a lack of internet or a lack of communications. But it strikes me that in some sense, this is what the fund manager gets paid for because for many reasons, including the fact that it's not trivial to look up data or even access these markets. A lot of investors are never going to be participating in this market. And then you layer in on all these additional complications, like this is essentially, at least in theory, the deep risks that in theory you get compensated for.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get compensated for actually giving access to the market because it's very difficult or impossible to get access at this moment as a non-resident in Iran to the local stock market. But also you get paid for solving all the operational problems. You know, we have quite a long track record in Iran. And the main thing actually that we are really proud of, because investing when everything is priced for war is fairly easy. And also you have a market that is very inefficient because it's driven by retail investors. Like 90% of daily flows are coming from retail. So there is a lot of alpha, a lot of inefficiencies that you can harvest. But the real issue is our operations. One thing is due diligence. I mean, you know, a lot of sanction restrictions, which are not on the whole country,

• 9:42Speaker 04

  but were related to many different entities, sectors and so on. So you have to do due diligence on every single decision you're taking, before every decision you're taking. But also you need to solve the problems. For example, the problem of exchanging currency, making transfers. Iranian banks are not connected to the SWIFT system. There are specialized banks that actually do, for example, payments for humanitarian trade with Venezuela, right? Or Iran. So food, medical devices, this is never under sanctions and you need to be able to pay for it. But those transfers take like nine months to execute, right? We, I remember we once had to process a payment probably like a very, very official way.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  We had to have the signature of the actual minister in Iran approving the payment, right? So it took nine months altogether. But there are other ways, there are other corridors, payment corridors that across emerging markets and including Iran, that make it much more efficient. So for example, right now, when you have the stock market, the currency market were shut down, but you could track the exchange rate, what's going on with the exchange rate of the Iranian real versus dollar, either on Telegram chats, but also on cryptocurrency exchanges. So you have, you know, liquid market on stable coins versus Iranian real inside of Iran, where, well, liquidity was limited.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  During the last period anyway, but we could see the changes. So we knew that one dollar before the war was at around eight hundred thirty thousand reals per one dollar. Then it went up roughly fifteen percent to nine hundred fifty thousand. And now after after the ceasefire, it's back down at eight hundred fifty thousand. So you can track the market. You can actually make make transactions depending on the on the liquidity, but it is possible. And to be honest, I mean, when I saw those exchange rates moves fifteen percent, when you have a war where a lot of commentators were saying that this could turn into a massive worldwide conflict, that fifteen percent in a country like Iran, I would say that this is, you know, your usual volatility on the currency market.

• 11:52Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm. Wait, so when you're talking to your team on the ground, when you can get hold of them, what are the questions you're asking them exactly? Because the markets are closed, so presumably you're not marking your portfolio to market on a daily basis. But what information are you trying to get?

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Well, the first few days, the only information I was interested in was if they were safe, to be honest. Because, you know, the the what residents of Tehran and some other cities cities experienced was they've never experienced just explosions in the city. It's like the older Iranians compared to the eighties when Iran was fighting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And this is when, you know, the last last time when when when someone was firing missiles at Iranian cities. So after a few explosions that were too close to home, they basically evacuated, they moved to smaller cities. And this was a big trend in Iran. So in Tehran, a lot of residents were just relocating out of Tehran. Tehran is a big city, it's like twelve million people.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  And they were moving mainly north to some smaller cities by the Caspian Sea. So you had massive congestion, like people were spending hours in traffic jams trying to get out of Tehran. There was not enough petrol on on gas stations just because of this peak in demand. You had some petrol rationing. And then I was asking them, OK, so is the economy working, not working? So everything that was non-essential basically was closed. So you couldn't, I don't know, build, buy building materials or anything like this. But groceries, pharmaceuticals, well, gas stations, banks, this was all open and working properly with some disruptions. But those disruptions, for example, if you wanted to buy groceries.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  In the north of Iran, where everyone has just relocated, you had some bottlenecks, logistical bottlenecks. So distribution was not fast enough. So you had some shortages just for a little while. With banks, well, some branches were not operating at 100% capacity. But two banks got hacked. So you had some cyber attacks on two banks in Iran and one cryptocurrency exchange. The rest of the banking sector was working without any distractions. You could get cash from many ATMs. So there was, there were no problems like this. So these were the questions about everyday life. And then very importantly, have any listed companies reported any damages?

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Right, that has there been any destruction to civilian infrastructure important for the Iranian economy?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 14:51Speaker 07

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in. Digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing. And folks who service institutional clients.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says. A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 16:18Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 17:00Joe Weisenthal?

  It's pretty crazy how hard it is apparently to get data. I'm actually at the Tehran Stock Exchange Wikipedia page, and whoever maintains that page hasn't updated the number of listed companies since 2009, and there's a stock market chart here that goes to 2014. Setting aside the last couple of weeks, how have Iranian stocks been doing the last year or couple of years?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Iranian stocks, you have to observe it in US dollars or in any hard currency, right? Because in local currency, obviously, it doesn't tell you anything. If you looked at the stock market in Zimbabwe, when Zimbabwe was going bust, the stock market was performing amazingly in nominal terms, in local currency terms, but obviously in dollars, it was going to zero. And it's interesting because, okay, there is information, very up-to-date. Detailed information on Iranian stocks available in Iran. But the majority of this information is not accessible if you're trying to access it from a computer with your IP address outside of Iran. So a lot of this information is restricted to Iran IP only.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  But you cannot find anywhere on the, in the whole internet, right? There is no website that shows the stock market index in dollars. So when we send it out to our investors or just people who want to read news about the stock market in Iran, we are the only source of this information. This is quite amazing. I mean, it's a country of 90 million people and, you know, stock market with 700 companies and there is no single place in internet that would show you the only important index, right?

• 18:34Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that's really stunning. Okay, so when I think of the Iranian stock market, I think of two things. I think oil and then I think geopolitical risk. How does the market typically handle or what do those exposures actually look like and do when there's a big event such as what we saw in the past week?

• 18:54Speaker 04

  So in terms of oil, oil is not really publicly traded. There is one Iranian monopoly called National Iranian Oil Corporation or company that is responsible for production. Yeah, I think this is, this is all centralized in one company and this is held by the government. So it's not publicly listed. You have some exposure to oil through oil refineries that are listed, but refineries don't trade, they're not sensitive to the price of oil, they are sensitive to the, to the crack spread, right? So which, which defines their margin on refining margin. So they are not really a proxy to oil prices. The whole stock market actually is well diversified.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  So you have, you know, large sectors such as chemicals, mainly these are like petrochemicals, I don't know, companies that, that produce different products, different versions, use natural gas that is in, in large supply as a cheap commodity and produce fertilizers or products like this, right? So this is probably 20% of the stock market. Then you have steel companies, the largest steel companies. In the Middle East is in Iran. You have carmakers that produce around one million cars, more than one million cars a year. So with car manufacturers, you have all the related industries, suppliers, you know, to the car manufacturing businesses. You have banks, financials, it's an important sector, plus some consumer exposures, some building materials.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Cement companies are one of the best performers over the last few years, actually. Yeah, so it's a well diversified stock market like Iranian economy.

• 20:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, sorry, just to follow up on the question before. In USD terms, generally, how has the Tehran stock market been performing? Setting aside the fact that.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, I didn't answer your question. Yes, so over the last, I don't know, eight years, I think. So let's say since the US and Iran signed the nuclear deal back in 2016, so almost a decade ago, it should be roughly double that level right now. So it doubled since then. But in the meantime, there's been quite a lot of roller coasters. So Iranian stocks in dollar terms are three times lower right now, around three times lower compared to their level back in 2020. So if you compare to August 2020, when there was a peak of a local, let's say, bull market and a bubble, right now, stocks are around three times lower than that in dollar terms.

• 21:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Got it.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  And that's the main reason for that. Over the last two years has been the sentiment. Because 2023 started to really well for the region. There was this historical breakthrough agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Both countries decided that they don't want conflict. It was basically like a peace treaty. They opened up embassies in both countries. And that was huge because Saudi finance minister was talking about investment opportunities in Iran. Iranian exporters were hoping for new export markets to open up in the region, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to whatever other countries around.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  There was like a very positive moment. At the same time, Biden administration was negotiating with the former Iranian government. So everything looked really, really promising. Instead, obviously, what happened in October was Hamas, it was Gaza, and that changed everything. Like sentiment collapsed and no one really wanted to look at any risky assets in Iran. So you had a situation where profits were going up when you're looking at Iranian listed companies. Profits continued to grow, but the stock market was going down. So obviously, valuations are just cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. But everyone was focused basically on the potential for the regional escalation, rightfully so,

• 22:51Speaker 04

  and not on, you know, taking risk in their portfolios.

• 22:54Joe Weisenthal?

  So just big picture, from your perspective, because thinking back to your first answer, where you talked about, okay, here's in theory what some comps could be. And it could look like Turkey, or it has resources potentially on scale with Saudi Arabia. How much of the bet, so to speak, from your perspective, is what people say like, the option value from something happening, either it's a major softening between Iran and the West, perhaps regime change, something that triggers the big unlock? Like, how much in your mind is it about at some point, something will reset and that massive opportunity could actually be tapped?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  So you're asking about the potential of this opportunity?

• 23:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, like basically, like, basically, okay, it's going to move around, there's sentiment here and there, but that at some point down the future, that actual opportunity to be an economy and be a market on the scale of a Turkey could one day actually be realized through some switch that gets flipped?

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Look, this is probably, I mean, from my perspective, the biggest optionality in enlisted markets, in public markets that you can find.

• 24:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Because one thing is GDP. And GDP, the way I look at GDP currently, I mean, if you Google it, it says around $400 billion. We think it's more like $250 billion. It depends on the exchange rate that you use to calculate it. So let's say Iran is $250 billion. GDP. And now Iranian non-oil economy, non-commodity economy, if everything goes well, could be as big as Turkey. And Turkey is 1.1 trillion. And this is without any commodities.

• 24:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Because Turkey.

• 24:32Joe Weisenthal?

  But it would need to be, it would need to be an event, like something would need to happen, right? Is this the idea?

• 24:38Speaker 04

  Oh, right. So, so.

• 24:38Joe Weisenthal?

  For, for the, yeah, yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The, the catalyst is clear, right? Okay, I'll, I'll get back to with the potential for GDP in a moment, but the catalyst is absolutely clear. It must be the opening up of Iran as a country and opening up of the economy and sanctions lifted, the US sanctions lifted, right? So there must be an agreement between the US and Iran. And what needs to happen? Well, some sort of political change. So political attitude must change on both sides. But to be honest, many analysts were expecting some big dramatic event that needs to happen in Iran for the country to properly open up. And when you look at Iran right now, and you compare to, let's say, even a few years ago,

• 25:23Speaker 04

  when you had negotiations with the US, what were the biggest problem? Was it was always about two things, Iran and reaching uranium too much, basically, at the wrong level. And the second Iranian regional policies, right? So financing proxies from Hezbollah to Hamas, you know, Assad in Syria and so on, right? So these two things were always the problem that they couldn't negotiate over. When you look at it right now, well, to a large extent, both obstacles are gone. So potentially, this opens up a path to an agreement, an agreement, like a proper agreement. So not the type of nuclear agreement that was signed under Obama administration,

• 26:06Speaker 04

  which was never strong enough. And I think both Americans and Iranians understand this. I mean, proper agreement that lifts sanctions, US sanctions too, and opens up the country to everyone, to including like US investors, if they want to tap into the opportunity. And I think, I mean, it seems that this is the thinking in the US that if. We do it, we do it properly. And I think, I mean, not that I think, I mean, what we've been hearing from on the Iranian side, like a few weeks ago, when they were still negotiating, it was the same thing, that they were showing Iran the whole economy as a big opportunity, like a trillion dollar opportunity, right? Or two trillion dollar opportunity. I mean, it's a massive opportunity for all the investors.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  So this is the trigger. This is the catalyst that will unlock this optionality, this potential of Iran growing GDP from the current 250 billion to, in some perfect scenario, to 2.3 trillion dollars, which would be a combination of Saudi and Turkey GDP. Yeah, obviously, if everything went well.

• 27:09Tracy Alloway?

  Well, but the other thing that's been happening over the past week is we've had reports of an internal crackdown in Iran and people getting arrested and things like that. And when I think internal crackdown, I think hardening of capital controls, which Iran already has. What are you hearing on that side of things? Because presumably that would make your life, your job even harder.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Look, capital controls have been in place for Iranian entities for some time. When it comes to foreign investors, it's obviously difficult to access, but everyone who is there, and you have some really, really large, one of the largest Swiss companies, German companies, Japanese, French companies, still there, not increasing their scale of their operations, but just sustaining what they've had for the last 20 years there. And they are welcome. Same with investors. I mean, Iran desperately needs capital in the form of FDI, IDU, but portfolio investments as well to channel funding through the stock market to local private companies.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  So this is badly needed. And Iran is aware of that and understands this, offers government guarantees. We have the same guarantees as all the big European companies that are present there against extrapolation of assets and so on and so forth. So it's not that you're not welcome as a foreign investor. Quite the contrary, I would say. There are programs, there are designs. Designed to make your life easier. You could even actually, if you invest, I don't remember. It was around 200,000 euro or dollar equivalent. You get a residency in Iran if you were interested in this for five years, I think. So there are many, many programs designed specifically for foreign investors to, to make the local market more attractive.

• 28:59Speaker 04

  In terms of capital controls for local residents have been always in place. So limits on how much of foreign currency they are able to buy and for what purposes, right? So if you want to send your child to school in the US or somewhere and you have to pay for education. This has like different quotas, right? If, if you want to travel, this is like different, but it's very, very formalized and bureaucratic.

• 29:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Are there tech companies that trade on the Tehran stock market?

• 29:27Speaker 04

  There are tech companies. The ones that are, that are listed are related to enterprise software.

• 29:34Joe Weisenthal?

  That's what I figured, yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Oracle or SAP, but you have privately held companies that would like to IPO, but they are just waiting for the approval from the regulator. And these are quite amazing companies. You have Snap, which is like an Uber, but Snap has more rights in Tehran than Uber in any city in the world. It's a really world-class company. You have DJ Khaled, which is like Amazon, basically. Also a large company, one of the biggest success stories. And many, many, many smaller e-commerce companies that are in the private market.

• 30:07Joe Weisenthal?

  We'll look out for them.

• 30:12Tracy Alloway?

  Lots More is produced by Carmen Rodriguez and Dashil Bennett with help from Moses Ondom and Kale Brooks.

• 30:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Our sound engineer is Blake Maples. Sage Baum is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts.

• 30:23Tracy Alloway?

  Please rate, review and subscribe to Odd Lots and Lots More on your favorite podcast platforms.

• 30:29Joe Weisenthal?

  And remember that Bloomberg subscribers can listen to all of our podcasts ad-free by connecting through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.

• 30:40Speaker 03

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• 31:16Speaker 07

  This message comes from Edward Jones, where they believe rich is about more than saving and investing. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 31:41Speaker 02

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