September will have offered the Tunis Stock Exchange a rare paradox. The market appears very solid over the long term and markedly more fragile in the short term. The Tunindex closed the month at 18,386.4 points, down 5.3% over thirty days. It nonetheless shows a gain of 36.7% since the start of the year, the strongest among the main indices of the Arab markets tracked.
This wide gap is not a contradiction; it is a reading grid. It reminds us that a market can retreat without cracking. The real question is no longer the level of prices, but the quality of the trades that sustain them. It is from this angle, the texture of liquidity rather than the mere direction of the indices, that the past month is read.
The data from the September 2026 monthly report of the Arab Federation of Capital Markets (AFCM), on which this analysis rests, allow reconstructing this mechanism with precision. They show first that the value of transactions surged by 67.2% for the month, to $144.1 million from $86.2 million in August. At the same time, the entire Arab markets fell by 6.5%.
A rebound in liquidity that masks a tighter market
The figure for traded value, taken alone, suggests renewed appetite. The other indicators of Tunisian activity nuance the reach. The volume of shares traded fell by 27.9%, to 16.2 million shares, while the number of trades rose by 20.8%, to 44,499.
Fewer shares, more trades, and much more money: the equation describes a market where less paper was traded but at higher prices and larger unit sizes. According to calculations based on these data, the average value per share traded would have risen from about $3.8 to $8.9, and the average size of a trade from about $2,340 to $3,240.
The month would thus have been carried by a selective flow, concentrated on more expensive stocks or on larger ticket sizes, rather than by an automatic broadening of participation. This is a decisive nuance for a reader who judges a market’s health by the real depth of its order books.
A market capitalization eroding without disengaging
