Before a company's stock appears on an exchange like the DFM or ADX, it isn't public yet — regular people can't buy it. When a company decides to sell shares to the public for the first time, this is called an IPO, which stands for Initial Public Offering.
To set a starting price, the company works with banks. These banks look at things like how much money the company makes, what similar companies are worth, and how interested big investors are when they get a chance to buy shares early, before anyone else can.
But that starting price is really just a smart guess. The real price gets set the moment the stock actually starts trading on the exchange — buyers and sellers meeting and agreeing, the same way it works for every other stock already listed. If the guess was too high or too low, normal buying and selling fixes it almost right away once trading opens.
In simple words, a market is just a place where buyers and sellers meet to agree on a price. A vegetable stand is a market. So is a stock exchange like the DFM or ADX. The only difference is what's being bought and sold, and how many people are doing it at the same time.
Nobody decides a stock's price and announces it. A buyer offers what they think it's worth. A seller accepts, or says no. A trade happens when both sides agree. Now picture thousands of buyers and sellers doing this at the same time — that's why the price keeps changing. Nobody is changing it on purpose. It changes because the point where people agree keeps moving.
Prices move when the balance between buyers and sellers changes, and that usually happens because of new information. Say a company reports higher profits than expected — suddenly more people want to buy at the current price, so the price goes up. Or a central bank hints that interest rates might rise, so some investors decide other options look better, and the price goes down instead.
Here's the key idea: a price doesn't tell you whether a company is "good" or "bad." It's just a lot of people's best guess of what the company is worth right now, and that guess keeps changing as new information comes in.
People mix these two up all the time, but they're not the same thing. The economy is what's actually happening right now — people working, spending money, and businesses making goods and offering services. The stock market is more like a bet on the future — what investors think companies will be worth months or years from now.
That's why the market can go up even when everyday economic news feels bad, or go down even when things seem fine. It's not reacting to today. It's always trying to guess what tomorrow will look like.
The Dubai Financial Market (DFM) and Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) both trade Monday to Friday, from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. Saturday and Sunday are the weekly holiday — this has been the schedule since the UAE's working week changed in January 2022. Outside these hours, prices simply don't update, no matter what's happening in the news.