When the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX) finally resumed trading on March 23, six weeks after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, officials were pragmatic about the day’s 8.9 percent drop in the EGX 30 index. The gain of freedom far outweighed the economic cost of the revolution, interim EGX Chairman Mohammed Abdel-Salam told reporters. It did not come as much of a surprise that Egypt’s benchmark index nosedived in the first 30 minutes of trading after the market’s revolutionary hiatus since January 24. A great deal has happened in those two months, during which the EGX lost just short of 40 sessions. During the period of market closure in Cairo, the only evidentiary indications of how investors felt about Egyptian equities came from the trade of Global Depository Receipts (GDRs) of Egyptian stocks on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), where the handful of actively traded Egyptian GDRs dropped mightily. Of
