Equity market begins trading week with lose, sheds 0.25%

 

The Nigerian Stock market maintained a downward trend at the start of the week today as the All Share Index (ASI) slid 21 basis points to 41,845.92 points while year till date return contracted to 9.4 percent. As a result, investors lost N32.2 billion in value as market capitalization decreased to N14.9 trillion. The bearish performance of the market today was primarily due to profit taking in large cap stocks – Nigerian Breweries (-3.4 percent), ETI (-4.8 percent) and Stanbic IBTC (-2.0 percent) . Similarly, activity level declined as volume and value of shares traded fell 23.4 percent and 25.9 percent to 326.9 million units and N5.3 billion respectively. The top traded stocks by volume were Zenith Bank (128.9 million), FBN Holdings (23.8 million) and Fidelity Bank (16.7 million) while Zenith Bank (N3.5 billion), Guaranty Trust Bank (N0.4 billion) and FBN Holdings (N0.3 billion) were the top traded stocks by value.
Sector performance was largely bearish as 4 of 5 indices under our coverage closed in the red. The Industrial Goods index was the lone gainer, up 0.5 percent largely due to buying interest in Dangote Cement (+0.4 percent). On the flipside, the Insurance index was the biggest loser, down 2.8 percent following sell offs in Continental Reinsurance (-4.7 percent) and Wapic Insurance (-5.0 percent). The Banking index trailed, shedding 2.1 percent on account of price depreciation in ETI (-4.8 percent). Likewise, the Consumer Goods and Oil & Gas indices fell 1.8 percent and 0.6 percent respectively as investors booked profit in Nigerian Breweries (-3.4 percent), Dangote Flour (-4.8 percent) and Total Nigeria (-5.7 percent).
Investor sentiment, measured by market breadth (advance/decline ratio) stayed flat at 0.4x as 14 stocks advanced while 34 stocks declined. The best performing stocks were C&I Leasing (+9.9 percent), UCAP (+5.6 percent) and NEM Insurance (+4.8 percent) while the worst performers were CADBURY (-9.6 percent), Niger Insurance (-9.5 percent) and Unity Kapital (-8.9 percent).