Tehran’s Market Rose 23 Percent. So Did the Dollar.

Between 8 July and 2 September 2026 the Tehran Stock Exchange all-share index rose 23.02 percent and the dollar rose 23.56 percent against the toman on the Tehran Index daily currency series. All seven listed technology and telecom companies in our registry of 377 public records went up in rial. Three of them went down in dollars. The exchange's own computer sector index and the Iran Fara Bourse index both land within one and a half points of zero on the same adjustment.

Between 8 July and 2 September 2026, the Tehran Stock Exchange all-share index rose 23.02 percent. Every one of the seven technology and telecom companies in the Tehran Index registry that trade on an Iranian exchange rose too, by 9.79 percent at the bottom and 75.00 percent at the top.

Over the same 56 days, the dollar rose 23.56 percent against the toman on our own daily currency series.

Those two numbers are half a percentage point apart, and that gap is the finding. Iran’s equity market did not go up in any currency an outside investor can spend. Its unit of account went down, and the prices followed. A foreign reader looking at a 23 percent index gain is looking at a currency chart with a stock exchange drawn on top of it.

The breakeven line is 23.6 percent

Start with the arithmetic, because everything else in this note is a consequence of it. If the toman falls far enough that a dollar costs 23.56 percent more toman at the end of a period than at the start, then a rial asset has to appreciate 23.56 percent over that period simply to be worth the same number of dollars it was worth before. It has not gained. It has held.

That is the line each of these seven had to clear between 8 July and 2 September 2026. Four cleared it. Three did not.

Asan Pardakht Persian, a listed payment processor, rose 9.79 percent in rial and lost 11.14 percent of its dollar value. Parsian E-Commerce lost 4.19 percent. System Group, whose listed entity is Hamkaran System, gained 23.22 percent in rial and finished 0.27 percent lower in dollars, which is as close to a perfect currency wash as this data produces.

At the other end, Hamrah-e Aval gained 41.63 percent in dollars. That is a real return and it is worth saying so. Tapsi, the only company of the smartphone era trading anywhere in Iran, gained 23.90 percent. Whatever else is true, this is a market where stock selection mattered far more than the market did.

Three indices give the same answer, so this is not a basket artefact

Seven companies is a small sample and an equal-weighted mean of seven is a fragile statistic. So we checked the finding against three published indices that have nothing to do with our selection: the exchange’s own all-share index, the Iran Fara Bourse index, and the exchange’s sector index for computers and related activities, which the data provider states covers 38 symbols.

All three landed inside a band of 23.0 to 25.4 percent in rial, and all three landed within one and a half percentage points of zero in dollars. The main exchange, the second exchange and the technology sector index each did approximately nothing over eight weeks, measured in a currency an outside investor can spend.

Note which way the remaining uncertainty cuts. Our seven lines are closing prices with no dividends in them. The index levels are the exchange’s own, computed on the exchange’s own basis, which we have not independently established. We do not net one against the other and neither should a reader. But if the published indices carry any dividend effect that our closing prices do not, then the price-only market return was lower than 23 percent, and the dollar figure above is generous rather than harsh.

Our start date is the conservative one

A short window invites the obvious question: did we pick the dates? We did not. 8 July 2026 is simply the first capture in the Tehran Index market layer, and 2 September 2026 is the most recent. Both fell on a Wednesday and both were full trading sessions.

The choice is unflattering to our own finding rather than flattering. The all-share index fell through the middle of July and bottomed at 4,773,252 on 18 July 2026. Measured from that trough instead, the market is up 36.26 percent in rial, which would have made the rally look considerably better against the same currency move. We use the start of our own series because it is the start of our own series.

What actually trades, and what it is made of

The composition of this basket is worth stating precisely, because “Iranian technology stocks” sounds like a sector and is not one. The Tehran Index registry holds 402 records, 377 of them public on 4 September 2026 when this was computed (the registry count moves as records are merged or added). Seven of the 377 trade on an Iranian exchange.

By our own sector classification those seven are three fintech companies, all of them payment processors, two telecom incumbents, one enterprise-software house and one ride-hailing company. Not one is an e-commerce company. There is no marketplace on the list, no app store, no logistics platform and no digital bank, and none of the other 370 public records in our registry trades anywhere.

The exchange’s own classification tells the same story from the other side. Four of the seven sit in the group the exchange calls computers and related activities, which is where System Group, Behpardakht Mellat, Asan Pardakht and Parsian E-Commerce all appear. Two, Hamrah-e Aval and the Telecommunication Company of Iran, sit in the telecommunications group, and on the exchange’s own classification each is the other’s only listed peer in it. Iran’s listed telecom sector, so classified, is two companies. The seventh, Tapsi, trades on Iran Fara Bourse and is therefore in neither Tehran Stock Exchange group and in no Tehran Stock Exchange sector index.

We mapped the venues and the boards in Iran Built a Startup Board. Almost Nobody Is On It. and read the roster company by company in Iran’s Startup Exchange Is Mostly Food, Metals and Textiles. What is new here is not the map. It is the return.

What is new against our own earlier work

Iran’s Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problem made the currency argument on an unlisted portfolio, using an outside investor’s audited marks, restated once a year, on assets with no observable price. The reasonable objection to that piece was that a private mark is a matter of judgement, and that a portfolio writedown might say more about the marker than about the market.

This note answers that objection with the only Iranian assets where price discovery happens every session. These are quoted securities. Thousands of domestic investors set these prices in public, five sessions a week, with no valuation committee anywhere near them. The answer comes out the same. That is the new contribution, and it is worth more than the private-portfolio version precisely because nobody had to form a view for it to be true.

There is a second thing this adds. The earlier piece was about foreign investors trying to get money out. This one is about anybody, foreign or domestic, trying to measure whether they made anything. On this window a domestic saver who bought the whole Tehran market and a domestic saver who bought dollars and did nothing ended up in almost exactly the same place, and the one who bought Asan Pardakht ended up behind.

Why it matters for the listing queue

Iran is about to test this. Iranian press reporting in August 2026 put 42 companies in the queue for a Fara Bourse listing, and Digikala has been admitted to the Tehran Stock Exchange without yet being offered. Every one of those offerings will be priced in rial and reported in rial, and every rial headline will be quoted internationally without a currency line attached to it.

The correct way to read those headlines is the one this note demonstrates. A rial price move is not a return until it is measured against the currency it is denominated in. On the eight weeks we have measured, that adjustment turned a 23.56 percent rial gain into nothing at all, and three of Iran’s seven listed technology and telecom companies went from a gain to a loss when it was applied.

None of this is a judgement on the companies. Hamrah-e Aval and Tapsi delivered real dollar returns in this window, and a market where the spread between best and worst runs from plus 41.63 percent to minus 11.14 percent in eight weeks is a market where the individual company is doing most of the work. That is a more interesting market than the index makes it look. It is just not the market the index headline describes.

What we do not know

The gaps are part of the record. This is a 56 day window with five captures in it, which is a series and not a history; the same arithmetic over a different window would produce different numbers, and nothing here should be annualised.

One of those five captures has a problem, and it is ours. Our 20 August 2026 capture carries a Thursday date, and Iranian exchanges do not trade on a Thursday. Three independent index histories agree: the computer sector index and the Fara Bourse index have no 20 August row at all, and the all-share index shows a carried value with no open, high or low. That capture is almost certainly the 19 August close recorded under the wrong date. It is excluded from every calculation in this note and it needs correcting at source.

We have not established the construction basis of the published indices, which is why we present them beside our own lines rather than against them. Our closing prices come from a mirror of the Tehran market data rather than from the exchange’s own terminal, which is what our market layer already records. Our currency series is a free-market rate, and Iran has more than one rate; an investor entitled to convert at a protected rate would get a different answer, and we wrote about exactly that mechanism in the exit piece above. An auditor-reviewed alternative exists and we derived it in The Audited Discount Rate on an Iranian Cash Flow Is 79 Percent, but it is published twice a year and cannot date two sessions eight weeks apart. We hold 12 currency captures on 8 July and only 2 on 2 September, so the second endpoint is thinner than the first. And we publish the currency move as a percentage because our rate level is an internal working number, not a rate we are in the business of quoting.

One more, on our own coverage. Across 836 public facts, not one states a figure in dollar-adjusted or currency-adjusted terms. The nearest thing is fact 85 on System Group, a market capitalisation carrying a point-in-time dollar equivalent, which is a conversion and not a return. That fact was also computed from the 8 July price and is now 23.22 percent stale in rial. Anyone running the same query will find the same row, so we name it here rather than let a bare zero stand.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Tehran’s Market Rose 23 Percent. So Did the Dollar.”, 4 September 2026. Share prices from the Tehran Index market layer and currency changes from the Tehran Index daily FX series, both for the 8 July 2026 and 2 September 2026 sessions and both re-queried on 4 September 2026. Index levels as published by the Tehran Stock Exchange and Iran Fara Bourse, read 4 September 2026. tehranindex.com