Chinwendu Obienyi
Trading on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) took a downturn following sell-offs in the shares of some bellwether stocks, thus driving the All Share Index (ASI) down by 0.91 per cent on Monday.
This was even as investors lost N119 billion when market closed yesterday at 24,954.25 points and N13.017 trillion, while year-to-date loss worsened to -7 per cent. Further analysis of the performance of the market showed that the volume and value of stocks traded declined by 29.5 and 52.7 per cent respectively to 237.65 million units and N1.60 billion, exchanged in 4,808 deals. This came as analysts at Afrinvest in their research note, said, “We expect profit-taking activities to weigh on the performance of the equities market this week”.
FBN Holdings was the most active stock with the sale of 24.35 million shares valued at N128.75 million. Zenith Bank traded 24.13 million shares valued at N392.36 million while FCMB sold 19.46 million shares worth N33.48 million.
Meanwhile, trading performance was bearish accross as only the Insurance index (+0.9 per cent) appreciated as a result of gain in Cornerstone (+9.8 per cent). The Banking (-1.9 per cent) and Industrial Goods (-1.4 per cent) indices led the laggards due to price weakness in Zenith (UBA (-5.2 per cent) and BUA Cement (-1.8 per cent). The AFR-ICT (-1.0 per cent) and Oil & Gas (-0.3 per cent) indices also declined, following price declines in MTNN (-1.7 per cent) and Oando (-3.1 per cent). Lastly, the Consumer Goods index slightly declined by 0.03 per cent on the back of a loss in International Breweries (-1.1 per cent). Prestige led 17 others on the losers’ chart with 10 per cent to close at 0.63 kobo per share. Neimeth followed with 9.73 per cent to close at N2.32, AIICO lost 9.32 per cent to close at N1.07, ETI decreased by 7.34 per cent to close at N5.05 while UAC-Prop dropped 6.73 per cent to close at 0.97 kobo.