By Chinwendu Obienyi
Transactions on the trading floor of the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX)started the new week on a negative note as the benchmark index shed 0.01 per cent to settle at 49,657.33 points.
Sell-offs in the shares of Presco, FBN Holdings and AccessCorp contributed to the downturn despite gains recorded in BUA Cement, MTNN and Zenith Bank.
Specifically, investors lost N4 billion as market capitalisation closed at N26.768 trillion from an opening value of N26.787 trillion.
Accordingly, the Month-to-Date loss and Year-to-Date gain settled at -1.4 per cent and 16.3 per cent respectively.
Sectoral Performance was mixed, as the Industrial Goods (+0.2 per cent), and Banking (+0.2 per cent) indices advanced, while the Consumer Goods (-0.6 per cent) and Oil & Gas (-0.4 per cent) indices declined. The Insurance index on the other hand, closed flat.
Analysis of Monday’s market activities showed that trade turnover settled lower relative to the previous session, with the value of transactions decreasing by 58.78 per cent as a total of 210.84 million units of shares valued at N2.19 billion were exchanged in 4,122 deals.
ETranzact was the most active stock with the sale of 52.55 million shares valued at N119.83 million. FBN Holdings followed, trading over 23 million shares worth N249.78 million while UBA traded 21.89 million shares valued at N153.48 million.
Further analysis of the market’s performance showed that investors’ appetite for stocks was negative as 16 stocks depreciated in value while 12 others appreciated.
Presco topped the losers’ chart with 9.97 per cent to close at N147.60. Multiverse was next with 7.79 per cent to close at N2.25, Ikeja Hotel dropped 5.51 per cent to close at N1.20, Dangote Sugar fell by 4.19 per cent to close at N16 while Jaiz Bank declined by 3.30 per cent to close at 0.88 kobo.