Sustained rally in banking sector buoys market performance

It was a positive trading day, Monday, January 16, 2017, for Nigerian equities market as the All Share Index (ASI) added 18bps to close at 26,373.83 points, Afrinvest analysts.

Consequently, market capitalization improved by N16.5bn to settle at N9.1tn. The positive performance was driven by further gains in Tier-1 lenders – ZENITH (+2.1%), ETI (+4.3%) and ACCESS (+2.9%).

Market activity however remained mixed as volume traded improved by 17.1% to settle at 174.0m units while value traded fell 68.7% to settle at N1.2bn.

Banking Sector Leads Sector Gainer for the 4^th Consecutive Session
All sector indices closed lower save for the Banking index, up 1.3% due to active buying in ZENITH (+2.1%), ETI (+4.3%) and ACCESS (+2.9). Contrariwise, Insurance and Oil & Gas indices closed 0.6% lower apiece, dragged by losses in CONTINSURE (-3.6%), WAPIC (-1.9%), TOTAL (-4.9%) and FORTE (-0.6%). Similarly, the Consumer Goods index (-0.4%) closed in the red for the 10^th consecutive session on the back of sell-offs in GUINNESS (-4.1%) and 7UP (-3.9%) while the Industrial Goods index closed flat.

Market Breadth Improves
Investor sentiment improved today as market breadth strengthened to 1.1x (17 advancing stocks against 15 decliners) relative to 0.8x in the previous session. The best performing stocks were DIAMOND (+7.2%),NAHCO (+4.5%) and ETI (+4.3%) while NCR (-4.9%), TOTAL (-4.9%) and CUTIX (-4.5%) were the worst performers. Today’s positive performance is attributable to further interest in banking stocks which has sustained uptrend for 4 consecutive session due to bargain hunting. We do not expect the positive sentiment on banking stocks to be sustained for long as pressures in the macro-economic space remain unaddressed.