Good morning, friends — take heart, it is nearly the weekend. Still, we have plenty of interesting news for you this morning, so there’s that.

Investors are still getting their collective head around the odds (and implications) of a protracted US-China trade war, the talking heads tell us. Wall Street recovered on Tuesday, but Asian shares are struggling near a nearly four-month low this morning on “lingering concerns over the economic impact” of the trade war. The EGX30 closed up 0.9% on an anemic EGP 372 mn in total turnover.

The key takeaway: Volatility is decidedly back on the menu, and anyone who tells you that the selloff in equities is deepening or that trade fears are miraculously “easing” hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about. Or in slightly more mature terms: “It’s just too early to tell if this is a buy, on slightly oversold conditions, or if it’s the start of stabilization … we’re going to be in for a period of volatility for most the next month as we await the G-20 meeting,” as one Bloomberg analyst put it.

(That G-20 meeting? June 28 and 29 in Osaka, Japan.)

Keep an eye on: The Donald calling on the US Federal Reserve to throw its lot in with the trade war, the Financial Times suggests. Trump thinks America will win the trade war if the “US central bank matches stimulus moves in Beijing.” He is also expected this week to order that US companies stop using “telecommunications equipment made by firms posing a national security risk, paving the way for a ban on doing business with China’s Huawei,” Reuters adds.

SIGN OF THE TIMES: UAE’s Finablr has cut its IPO price amid weak investor demand, Reuters says. The payments platform had planned to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange at GBP 2.10-2.60 per share but has since priced at GBP 1.75 amid the ongoing market jitters — and that after it kicked back its closing day. The new share price gives the company an implied market value of around USD 1.59 bn. Our friends at EFG Hermes are serving as joint bookrunners on the transaction, which is being led by JPMorgan, Barclays and Goldman Sachs.

Also in the market right now: Arabian Centres, Saudi Arabia’s largest owner and operator of shopping malls, which was looking to raise some USD 1 bn in what was being billed as the second-largest IPO ever in the kingdom. The company now looks on track to raise about USD 747 mn after pricing at the bottom of the range on which it had guided, putting it on track to close as the third-largest IPO in Saudi. EFG Hermes is also doing JBR duties here.

Across the pond, workplace messaging app Slack is pushing ahead with plans to directly list on the New York Stock Exchange on 20 June. The direct listing, which will not see it offer new shares, is getting plenty of ink in the FT (here and here).

What the heck is happening in the GCC? Two Saudi oil pumping stations were hit by drone attacks yesterday, “heightening concerns about the security of the kingdom’s energy infrastructure 48 hours after two of its tankers were struck.” Houthi rebels backed by Iran claimed responsibility for the pipeline attack. Coming as it does amid heightened tensions between the US and Iran, the news has the FT channeling its inner Rodney King, calling for us all to just get along. See more in the FT, Reuters and Bloomberg (here and here) as you prefer.

The robots’ latest move: Taking jobs boxing orders at Amazon, according to reports in the US press that suggest the Everything Store could cut as many as 1,300 US jobs as it replaces workers with machines that can pack at 4-5x the rate of a human, wrapping items in custom-built boxes at a rate of 600-700 boxes per hour.

Apparently, we join the rest of the world in loving Netflix: Viewers in Egypt and the UAE are loving Netflix, and it shows in positive impressions of (and good word-of-mouth about) the brand, according to data analytics firm YouGov

A pre-iftar reading list to kill time between your post-workout shower and the breaking of the fast:

Dive into the least-understood generation: Our TBR pile is now stuffed thanks to the New York Times’ awesome look at Generation X, the cohort of people sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials. The NYT’s Styles section argues that Xes “sold out, invented all things millennial, and caused everything else that’s great and awful.” Start there or with the package’s landing page, which argues that folks born 1965-1980 “set the precedent for today’s social justice warriors and capitalist super-soldiers.”

Did you, mid-way through reading this issue, stop to answer an email? Take a phone call? Reschedule a meeting? Work creep is real, and the proliferation of endless meetings and emails that serve hardly any purpose are two easy illustrations of the fact that we’ve become busier, running “on a treadmill of pointless activity,” according to this Economist piece. Instead of “leaning in” to this hectic pace, the “magazine” suggests leaning back. Take a leaf out of former GE boss Jack Welch’s book and spend an hour of “looking out of the window time.” Keep a “stop doing list,” à la Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great.” Protecting chunks of empty time in our day might be the secret to real productivity and, lest we sound as breathless as our peers across the pond, we must revive the practice “before we schedule ourselves to death.”

Read that alongside I trained myself to be less busy — and it dramatically improved my life, by a PhD psychologist writing for Vox’s First Person column. Easy fixes? No. But ideas worth exploring in our own lives nonetheless.

Take it to the next level with this CNBC piece on lessons learned from Yale’s “happiness class” — a class you can take without charge online, by the way.

RAMADAN PSA- Bank hours are at 9am-2pm for employees; doors are open from 9:30am until 1:30pm for customers. The trading day at the EGX runs 10:00am until 1:30pm.

GARDEN VARIETY PSA- It’s going to be hot today in the capital city, with the mercury set to hit 40°C today before heading to 41°C tomorrow.

So, when do we eat? Maghrib is at 6:41pm CLT today in Cairo. You’ll have until 3:23am tomorrow morning to caffeinate / finish your sohour.