Following four days of busy trading last week, investors’ interest in some listed Tier-1 banks and BUA Cement Plc helped the market capitalization of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX) rise by N119 billion to conclude at N25.91 trillion.
The Federal Government proclaimed Monday a national holiday in honor of the 2022 Eid-el-Maulud celebration, therefore the stock market was open for four trading days last week.
Even if the trading week was short, it was still enough for the NGX stock market to reverse its five-week bearish trend.
As a result, the week-over-week performance of the All-Share index increased by 0.5% to close at 47,569.04 basis points from 47,351.43 basis points when trading began.
The weekly stock market gain was driven by a gain of about 8.7% in BUA Cement, which closed at N56.50 per share, and some tier-1 banks, including Guaranty Trust Holding Company, which increased by 5.3% to close at N17.90, Access Holdings, which increased by 5.3% to close at N8.00 per share, and Zenith Bank, which increased by 2.3% to close at N20.00 per share.
As a result, the stock market’s Month-to-Date (MtD) and Year-to-Date (YtD) returns were respectively -3.0 and +11.4 percent.
Trading volume fell by 16.2% w/w while value traded rose by 34.9% week on week, indicating a mixed degree of activity.
When looking at individual sectors, the Industrial Goods index increased by 3.2%, the Banking index increased by 1.9%, and the Insurance index increased by 1.7%. In contrast, the Oil & Gas index decreased by 2.1% and the Consumer Goods index decreased by 0.7% as the market closed in the negative.
Analysts from Cordros Research commented on the stock market outlook for this week as follows:
We believe investors will remain reluctant to leave gains in the market. As such, we expect intermittent profit-taking to persist. However, we expect this to be tempered by bargain-hunting activities from early birds ahead of the Q3 2022 earnings season. Notwithstanding, we advise investors to take positions in only fundamentally sound stocks as the fragility of the macro environment remains a significant headwind for corporate earnings.”
