Nigerian stock market closed lower at the start of the week, halting six sessions of successive gains, as profit-taking ensued and led to sell pressure.
The heat of the pressure was specifically driven by investors’ activities on the shares of GUARANTY and DANGCEM which nosedived in price values by -2.5 per cent and -3.6 per cent respectively, as both stocks were the major movers of the market.
Consequently, the benchmark index of the stock market was down by 0.09 per cent as it shed 23.41 points to close at 25,582.23 basis points while market capitalisation declined by the same percentage points to post N12 billion loss and close at N13.346 trillion.
Accordingly, the Month-to-Date (MtD) gain moderated to 1.0 per cent while Year-to-Date (YtD) loss increased to -4.7 per cent.
Recall that the bearish session marked the first negative performance in six trading days, thus, making profit-taking very predictable as earlier reported by Business Metrics.
Meanwhile, the turnover for the session equally suffered significant decline despite efforts by some banking stocks to shore up volume and value of trades.
Data from the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) analysed by Business Metrics show that volume and value of trades contracted by 39.24 per cent and 47.2 per cent respectively to close the session.
Amidst this, market breadth closed positive with emergence of 16 gainers against 15 declines, while 14 other securities closed the session on unchanged prices.
Stanbic topped the gainers’ list with N0.50 to close at N38.50 per share. Access Bank trailed with N0.35 rise in price to close at N6.80 per share.
Other top gainiers include CILeasing, ETERNA and NEM, gaining N0.30, N0.19 and N0.18 to close at N3.90, N2.27 and N2.25 per share in that order.
On the flip side, GUARANTY led other decliners as it closed lower at N25.90 after losing N0.65 in price.
DANSUGAR followed suit with N0.45 loss to close at N12.05. REDSTAREX, UBA and ZENITHBANK joined the list by shedding N0.17, N0.15 and N0.10 to close at N3.72, N6.30 and N17.30 per share respectively.
Across sectors, the Insurance and Oil and Gas indices recorded 0.7 per cent and 0.2 per cent, while the banking and consumer goods indices contracted by -0.7 per cent and -0.4 per cent accordingly. The Industrial Goods index was flat.
The turnover for the session was, in terms of trade volume and value, was driven mostly my UBA, ZENITHBANK and ACCESS.
UBA traded 44.349 million shares worth N291.992 million; ZENITHBANK followed with 30.821 million share units valued at N536.111 million while investors traded 29.115 million shares of ACCESS valued at N196.625 million.
The session closed with a total for 254.974 million shares worth N2 billion traded in 4,699 deals relative to 419.660 million shares estimated to worth N3.788 billion that exchanged hands in 4,152 transactions the previous session.
