Most of us are bias and that is okay. We are bias towards the region we live in, for if it is good enough to live there it is good enough to invest there. We often miss the opportunities that happen outside of our area. Most people do not have access to unlimited funds, which means trying to keep life reasonably simple means to invest in companies in our regional area to keep a watch on them. The reality is many countries outside of where we live have stock markets and they all perform in very similar fashion. One country is Qatar.

In an article by Hadeel Al Sayegh of Reuters, if you watched some or all of the FIFA World Cup, those stadiums were in Qatar. Now that the excitement has passed, Argentina won and seemingly more normal things are happening. Qatar being in the Middle East has access to oil and gas revenues and is the world’s largest LNG exporter.

IT services firm MEEZA is expected to raise $249 million in January with the selling of 50% of its shares on the Doha Stock Exchange.

The encourage more listings, the Doha Stock Exchange allows companies to offer a price range to test investor appetite and determine pricing.

Osama Ali, HSBC’s head of global banking in Qatar, noted 6 more companies may go public through IPOs in the next 18 months.

Foreign investors are still banned from taking part in IPOs, but they can buy and sell shares listed Qatari firms.

Qatar is classified as an emerging market by index bench marker MSCI. The market capitalization of the stock exchange is $158.2 billion, and the local competitors are Abu Dhubi”s $718.8 billion and Riyadh’s 2.72 trillion.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, when you buy these companies, you want to be able to have relatively simple rules on when you should sell, for you bought them both for their yield and potential capital gain. The idea of having simple rules is knowing when to sell or find alternatives and a simple way is for you to buy companies you deal with on a regular basis. When you do that, you tend to have regional bias, but that is ok. When you are doing your homework to examine alternatives you can find very good companies in other regions and other countries, fortunately they all are trying to do similar things, which makes it easier as an investor.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.