Charles Abuede
The mood in the market was mildly negative on Wednesday, underpinned by sell pressures in the banking space. Retreating from Tuesday’s gains, the local bourse finished the day slightly lower, indicating a 0.04 per cent drop in the NSE-ASI to 38,706.13 points following sell-offs across GUARANTY (-1.8%), FBNH (-1.4%), and MANSARD (-5.1%). Accordingly, the market year to date loss worsened to -3.9 per cent and market capitalisation reduced by N7.7 billion to N20.3 trillion.
Similarly, activity level tapered as the volume and value of traded units declined by 19.7 per cent and 36.4 per cent respectively to 177.4 million units and N2.7 billion. The most traded stocks by volume were GTBank (34.2m units), Zenith Bank (28.5m units) and UBA (17.7m units) while GTBank (N957.8m), Zenith Bank (₦572.1m) and Seplat Petroleum (N265.6m) led by value. Read Also:
Across sectors front, the performance was mixed as 3 indicators lost, 1 gained and the Industrial goods and ICT indices closed flat. The Oil and Gas index rose 1.7 per cent on the back of gains in Oando Plc (+9.7%) and Seplat Petroleum (+0.9%). Conversely, the insurance, banking and consumer goods indices lost by 1.0 per cent, 0.4 per cent and 2 basis points respectively following sell-offs in AXA Mansard (-5.1%) and GTBank (-1.8%) and Vita Foam (-5.2%).
Investor sentiment, as measured by market breadth (advance/decline ratio), strengthened to 1.1x from the 0.6x recorded previously as 13 stocks advanced against 12 losers. Wapic (+10.0%), SFSREIT (+9.9%) and Oando Plc (+9.7%) were the top gainers while NCR (-9.7%), Neimeth Pharmaceuticals (-9.1%) and Vita Foam (-5.2%) were the top losers.
NSE 30
The NSE 30 Index marginally decreased by 0.05 per cent to close at 1,534.52 points as against 1,535.24 points as on the previous day. Market turnover closed with a traded volume of 123.56 million units. Zenith and Seplat were the only gainers, while Fidelity and Guaranty were the key losers.
FX market
In the foreign exchange market on Wednesday, the Naira traded flat at N485 to a dollar in the parallel market while it remained stable at N409.75 to the dollar at the investor and exporter window and also traded unchanged at the official CBN window at N379 per dollar. Most participants maintained bids between N394 and N412 per dollar.
Treasury Market
The NT-Bills secondary market closed on a flat note with the average yield across the curve remaining unchanged at 3.13 per […]
