Odd Lots - Lots More on the Protests and Financial Crisis in Iran

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

One of the extraordinary elements of the civil unrest taking place in Iran is that it's almost impossible to know what's going on. There's a virtually complete news blackout, in part because of the government shutting down the internet. What this means in practice right now is that someone on the outside can't even know for sure whether the Iranian stock market has been trading lately, or whether it's been halted. And then of course there are bigger questions about the scale of the civil unrest and the government's response to it. On this episode of Lots More, we check in with recurring guest Maciej Wojtal, the founder and CIO of Amtelon Capital, one of the few international firms to have direct exposure to Iranian stocks. We talk about what he's been able to ascertain about the protests, why they're taking place, Iran's ongoing financial crisis, and why this round of civil unrest is different from before.READ MORE: How Iran Sanctions and a Currency Crash Triggered Mass ProtestsSubscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joe, do you like Persian food? Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I make, I'm very proud of this, if I say so myself, a mean gourmet sapsi. I actually don't know if I'm pronouncing it wrong, but supposedly it's the Iranian national dish. Huh. And it's a sort of like beef stew with spinach and a bunch of different herbs in it.

So it's really green and then with kidney beans, it's delicious. And the thing I like about it is you can make it and then store it, freeze it, and it actually gets better over the next week or so. This is my idea for a restaurant, which is just like make food and then put it in the fridge for overnight and then serve it cold because I think like every dish. I would be there. Every dish is better like after a night in the fridge. Somehow like all the flavors come out.

I was like, why don't we just make this to the default eating? I did a dead list. I am both the most popular trader and most successful trader at Citadel. Fed is going viral. Barges. This is an after-school special except... I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the U.S. Black gold!

These are the important questions. Is it robots taking over the world? No, I think that, like, in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the oddlots podcast. One day, that person will have the mandate of heaven. How do I get more popular and successful? We do have the perfect guest. You're listening to Lots More, where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now. Because even when the odd lots is over, there's always lots more.

And we really do have the perfect guest. So I'm a big fan of Iranian food. I always wanted to go to Iran and actually try it. Yes. And it makes me sad that I haven't been able to do it. And with, you know, recent events, terrible events in Iran, we've had anti-Islamic Republic protests that have reportedly left thousands of people dead. I'm not going to say the specific estimate because it's changing all the time. And also, there's not that much transparency at the

moment because the government has shut down the entire internet. But it's just sad. Look, I know very little about Iran. I also feel like in my professional career, there are multiple rounds of this. Big protests, et cetera. Is this the moment regime change? And to your point, which you say, like, there is very little that I trust when I see it reported. Yeah. I'm extremely skeptical, oh, tonight was the biggest set of protests we've had in years. There's never been a protest. Look at which city this is.

I'm sure there are well-informed people talking about this. I don't have the heuristics to note. Generally, I don't know who is well-informed. What is actually signal versus what is noise. But obviously yet another sort of extraordinary development unfolding here in 2026. Monta, what have you been hearing? So I agree that it's difficult really to tell what are the actual facts. For sure, there's been a lot of deaths, and it's horrible and it's tragic,

and it's definitely in thousands of deaths. But at the same time, you know, there's complete blackout. What works right now is the actually outgoing landline calls, but with limited time. So, for example, one of my analysts who is actually in London at the moment, is able to speak to his parents when they call him, and then the call gets interrupted quite quickly, but at least he can hear from them. We weren't actually sure for quite some time whether the stock market was working or not because of the blackout, because it was not possible to even to read any news from the official news agencies in Iran. So everything was down,

including, from what I've read, including even like the internal domestic, like an internet network in Iran that is very controlled. This was also down. Even ATMs stopped working for a moment, I think just like a one-day, brief moment. Cash transfers were working, bank transfers. Apparently the local Uber equivalent called SNAP was working all the time. However, GPS was not working properly, so it was difficult to locate the driver and so on. So exactly what you said, it's difficult to understand exactly what is going on.

So this is, of course, Machia Voigtel. He is the CEO of Amtelon Capital, which is a fund that specializes in Iranian equities. And there aren't that many of those around. I don't even know if there's a second one. Yeah. So we enjoy talking to him. And he has really good insights into what is actually happening on the ground in Iran. The first question I should ask directly is, is your team okay?

Are they safe and well, the people that you actually have in the country? Thank you for asking about that, Tracy. We have a local team in Tehran. part of which is actually in London at the moment. Now analysts who are in Tehran, who were in Tehran, they left Tehran a few days ago when the protests were getting more intense to smaller cities to their hometowns. So the last time we've heard from them was a couple of days ago. At that time, they were in a safe place. So I believe they're all fine. I mean, just your intuition, let's actually set aside the question of like, is this a moment where the regime would get toppled or

something like that, let's enter it. Does this feel either quantitatively or qualitatively different from various episodes over the last two decades in which suddenly the internet is looking at fairly blurry videos of Iranian protesters and asking, does this feel different somehow? Yes, it definitely does. Okay. So first of all, obviously looking at, you know, the history teaches you not to get excited or to, I don't know, hopeful for any meaningful. changes. However, it does feel different. And maybe two things could be interesting here. First of all, as you said, Joe, at the beginning, it's not the first protest. It's, you know, another protest over the years. And if you look at comparable situations, for example, Poland, Poland is always

close to my heart. I'm Polish originally. And Poland, when we were trying to get rid of the Soviet Union, it took nine years. And every year there was a massive protest. This protest, you know, died, and then, you know, with very brutal reaction from the government. Then the next year, there was another protest. In the meantime, there was martial law with, you know, military on the streets and so on. But finally, many things came together, and there was a tipping point at which everything collapsed. Although it didn't collapse, actually, it was a negotiated transition to a different regime. So, you know, the establishment got an off-ramp to move on, and it was a peaceful negotiated transition. Similar in South Africa, based on what I know. I mean, it was, you know, happening in the 80s and then in

the 90s, there were actual changes. In Iran, the situation is different because, for many reasons, demographics have changed. So now you have, I believe, around 93 million people, out of which 50 million is between, you know, 15 and 49 years old, but like the active part of the population. And there are many more young people who are educated, who have, you know, access to internet, have their own aspirations, and they don't believe they can achieve those aspirations in the current environment. And they also look at their parents and they think that they just wasted the whole generation, you know, waiting and doing nothing. So this makes them more angry and also, like, more decisive and confrontational. That's why I think it's, you know, the protests were so intense.

and so widespread. Another reason, another thing that's changed, is like you remember a few years ago, 3, 22, there were in 23, there were protests around social freedoms after an Iranian girl, Maxah Meeh, died. And this was driven by, basically, by social freedoms, and mainly involved young people.

Right now is driven by economic difficulties. And this touches every single household in Iran Yeah, I wanted to ask you about precisely this, because the, I don't want to say the cause of the recent unrest, but certainly one of the sparks seems to have been a further collapse in the currency, even higher inflation. And wasn't there something about a bank as well, a bank that was going bust, supposedly with ties to the regime? How much did financial stress play into the current round of civil unrest? Well, 100%. This was the main cause. Look, the protest starts. on the Grand Bazaar in Tehran. So these bazaaris, I mean, people who operate bazaars, many of them run like multimillion dollar revenue companies there, actually. It's like this massive shopping mall with tens of thousands of, you know,

smaller or bigger traders there. And they need stability to just, you know, do business, right? So protesting, revolution, like this is the last thing they would think about. But they are in a situation, you know, where many of them are importers. To import, you need to be able. to obtain a hard currency to just pay your supplier from Vietnam, China, whoever. It's impossible to obtain to access hard currency, or there's not enough of it. And that's obviously because of sanctions.

Because of sanctions, exports of Iran just went down. Iran is exporting oil only to China. So China is dictating all the terms, including big discounts in the price that they're paying, but also the terms of the payments, you know, the China is paying a big part of their payments are in yuan and they arrive in bank accounts in some Chinese banks. So Iran, you know, the only thing Iran can do with it is to buy some Chinese goods. And what Iran needs is to pay for essential goods, like, you know, some food products or some medical products that they need to import at any cost. And once they allocate all their hard currency reserves to those essential products, there is not much

left for other businesses. So this is one thing that is difficult to run a business when you cannot obtain currency. You have, you know, inflation running. while, but on the other hand, your consumers are losing their purchasing power at an extraordinary pace. So no one is buying, basically, right? You have to spend on, you know, eggs, milk and bread, probably, you know, more than 10% of your average monthly salary. So it looks really difficult on the economic side. Can I ask very quickly, do you have a sense of what the current exchange rate actually is? Because, you know, this is one of the few currencies in the world that we cannot look up on a Bloomberg terminal? Yeah, it's around 1.5 million real per one dollar,

which means it went down around 97, 98% over the last decade, and around 50%, almost 50% since before the war with Israel last year, so over the last seven months. So it's really falling fast. Oh, and one more thing. You asked about the bank. Yes, actually, there was a bank collapsing in Iran just a few months ago. I mean, they formally recognized that it should be nationalized. And it's extraordinary because the size of the collapse,

it was so big that it actually affected the budget of the country, the country budget for this year. So they had to reduce subsidies and just change, you know, the expenditures of the budget to make room for the amount

that they had to, I think it was like $5 billion, that they had to put into this so that it doesn't, you know, collapse. It was basically, and it's another example that, you know, makes people angry, obviously, because it's, it was a huge example of corruption. So, you know, there was a local, well-connected entrepreneur who was running a few construction companies. And it wasn't the case that, you know, he called a few banks and F for some preferential loans.

Now, he set up a bank, offered the highest interest rates on the market. So many people just put their deposits into this bank. And then he was using those deposits to, make loans to his own companies. I think it was like a majority of the loans were to his own companies, he built the biggest shopping mall in the region, which was, you know, a crazy idea from the beginning and many things like this. So another example of thornism and corruption. This is the shopping mall that's like as big as the Pentagon or something? Yeah, twice as big. I read that Wall Street Journal article twice as big is the Pentagon, this luxury shopping mall

in Iran suffering from massive hyperinflation and all the stories. But I have to say, starting your own bank to then just fund your construction company, A, kind of a brilliant idea. B, this is why bank supervision and various things. It's important. Actually exist. This is Tom Kean, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day. I'm Paul Sweeney.

We bring you complete coverage of the U.S. market open. We cover stocks, bonds, commodities, even crypto, all the information you need. need to excel. And I'm Alexis Christophress. Bloomberg surveillance also brings you the analysis behind the headlines. We do that through conversations with the smartest names in economics, finance, investment, and international relations. We do all this live each and every weekday, then bring you the best analysis in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg surveillance on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen at lunch. And on the West Coast, Listen as soon as you wake up.

That's the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast with Tom Keene, Paul Sweeney, and me, Alexis Christophores. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Surveillance, Essential Listening, each and every business day. It's surreal to me. The surreality of here is a country that right now is a de facto information black hole. You mentioned we don't know if the stock market is trading. Here's a country on earth. And right now, where we are in New York or where you are in London, we can't even answer the simple question is the stock market functioning right now.

Yeah, exactly. So all the stories that I hear is that the way people were able to communicate is because someone had access to a Starlink operating in Iran or someone's friend was working at a hospital. and hospital had some access to either the wide internet or some at these local networks. So that's why also it's not possible for the country to keep the blackout at this scale and intensity for too long. Because the whole economy stops, right? Actually, the administration of the countries is not possible, right, without internet. So it was sharp, intense, but it has to be short term because otherwise, you know, the country will just stop. What happens to your portfolio in this particular scenario, your investments?

So the stock market seems to have been stable over the last week. I don't see the exact numbers yet in terms of, for example, liquidity, and I suspect that there was not much going on because I'm not sure if even local investors had a chance to, were able to put orders online, right? Maybe it was old school calling your broker or going to your broker. So it was stable. So nothing actually went up by 4%.

and the currency was stable too. The currency is easier to manipulate by the central bank using some reserves, especially when there was low liquidity. So I think what will be more interesting is the next few weeks. So, for example, what happened last year after the war? When there was a war between Iran and Israel in June, the stock market was shut down for around two weeks. After it reopened, the prices didn't change much.

But then local investors, mainly retail investors, this retail-driven market, started selling because they didn't have access to their funds. So they started selling at any price just to get money out. And there was a massive selling pressure that lasted from July until September. And when the buyers saw a selling pressure like this, so every day you can see the queue of unfilled orders building up that will go to the next day and the next day and the next day, people just stopped buying as well, obviously. So the market went down, like, irrespective of, you know, which stocks, what quality, with valuation, or whatever, just a massive sell-off, which lasted two, three months, and then it rebounded.

So it went down, like, in dollar terms, from, let's say, index of, I don't know, 360 to 230, yes, if I'm looking at this correctly. so let's say 36% in dollar terms in just two and a half months. The selling pressure then was exhausted. All the selling, all the sales were absorbed. Valuations went down to the one of the, I think, very close levels to the all-time lows in the history of the Iranian stock market, which is around 20 years old. So, you know, it's always cheap, right?

But this time it went, you know, below three times net earnings, a median, media for the market. So you could probably find stocks, you know, two times earnings. Then it rebounded, but it's still around, you know, like three and a half times earning. So valuations are very much still driven by war. So everything is priced for war, right? So that's the sentiment hasn't really recovered after the last war and now we had protests. So everything in Iran is priced for war, basically. You know, in the news, obviously we hear or I think we get a better grasp.

And again, I plead a lot of ignorance. It's not something I have a lot of familiarity with. But what the protesters want. And you hear about young people and wanting more freedoms, can you give a sort of, I don't know, political economy breakdown of like, you know, you don't hear about the people who obviously don't want regime change. Generally speaking, they, we don't know much about them or who they are. Who are the sort of different factions socioeconomically that and how they allocate to either side, sort of, I guess, a class understanding of the tensions?

So there's a big group of young people, and young people want freedom and opportunities and like fair rules in the economy, basically. There are older people, adults in larger cities, which are more liberal. Definitely Tehran. Tehran is a big city. It's like 12 million people altogether. And life in Tehran looks different to most other cities in Iran with women no longer wearing hijab, It's much more open, it's much more liberal. But also, there is a big group of people who are very, very religious,

and they support the government that is also, there is a religious government. So the concept of Islamic Republic is very close to their heart, and they support it, and it's part of their religion and part of their traditions. So in terms of how they observe religious holidays, you know, going to mosque, dressing in a certain way. and so on. And now, how does this split? I would say that probably between 10 and 30 percent is the religious part, 10, like, very religious, and just listening to the prayer and, you know, whatever political advice comes from the mosque and so on, 30 percent of the, let's say,

afraid of the society just being religious and supporting the Islamic Republic as a religious state. Just a small note that it's an Islamic Republic, but very tolerant of other religions. I mean, all the churches work normally there from Jewish to Christian to Zerostrian. You know, everyone is doing his own thing in terms of religion in Iran, and it's okay. And the rest are people who want a modern, open state, with the young, including the young people who want it fast, basically, and want to be able to follow their dreams and aspirations. So that would be the breakdown. So I should just say we're recording this on January 15th.

The headlines are coming pretty fast nowadays. So who knows what will happen by the time we publish this episode in just 24 hours or so. But the latest headline is that tensions seem to have eased a little bit with the U.S. because the Iranian government said they're not going to kill any more people or told Trump, they're not going to execute more people. How should we interpret that? Is this all over, or do you expect some unrest to continue? Well, it's hard to predict.

It's very unpredictable. I mean, unrest is difficult to predict the dynamics around the unrest. Then, you know, the government of Iran is difficult to predict. But, you know, the government of the U.S. is difficult to predict. Because, you know, right now, yesterday, today, yesterday you had news, you had news that President Trump was saying that, yes, he got information that, you know, killing stopped. So this is what he was, you know, what he wanted to achieve. So it looks better.

The day before, everyone thought that, you know, they are getting ready to strike Iran. So I think those things can change in 24 hours. So it's just impossible to predict. The only thing I would say is that because it does feel different this time, the scale of the protests and the reasons of the protests. And also the government just can't spend, you know, their way out of the problem. It's the financial situation is really tough, but some changes are likely. I'm not saying that we're in the next few days or weeks, maybe it will take months. But I think it's just moving this direction.

So there are some changes that are likely, and many scenarios are possible. I mean, look at Venezuela. There was no regime change there, right? I mean, there was a, like, again, negotiated solution with, you know, Maduro taken out and the rest of the government and establishment, just, same place, but they have to cooperate, right? So there's probably more than one scenario possible for the future. What a world we live in where civil unrest is becoming a major investment theme. Thank you, Macha, for coming on Lots More. Really appreciate another update from you.

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