The Nigerian bourse opened on a positive note for the first time in three (3) successive weeks today.
The All Share Index (ASI) rose 34bps to close at 25,249.49 points whilst market capitalization increased N29.3bn to settle at N8.7tn.
As a result, YTD loss trimmed to –6.0%. Market performance was broadly driven by bargain hunting in Consumer Goods bellwether NIGERIAN BREWERIES (+ 4.2%) which took a beating last week. Market activity however weakened as volume and value traded fell 78.4% and 50.5% to 103.4m units and N980.0m in 2,160 deals.
However, sector performance was largely negative today as all sector indices closed negative save for the Consumer Goods which rebounded +2.2% on account of bargain hunting in NIGERIAN BREWERIES (+4.2%) and PZ (+9.0%).
On the flip side, the Banking and Insurance indices shed 0.2% and 0.1% respectively on the back of decline in ACCESS (-1.6%), UBA (-0.8%) and NEM (-2.5%). Similarly, the Oil & Gas index fell 0.6% as investors took profit in FORTE (-5.0%) whilst the Industrial Goods index closed flat.
Weaker sentiment for equities remain apparent in today’s trading session as market breadth (advancers/decliners ratio) closed at 0.6x as 10 stocks advanced while 18 declined. PZ (+9.0%), DIAMOND (+4.9%) and NASCON (+4.6%) led the gainers while FORTE (-5.0%), UACN (-4.9%) and NAHCO (-4.7%) led the laggards. Notwithstanding today’s positive performance, we expect sentiment to stay dampened by the attractive yields in the money market segment of the fixed income space amid low expectation on corporate earnings.
