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By Chukwuma Umeorah
Equities trading at the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) extended gains from last week to open the week bullish as the All-Share Index finished 0.7 per cent stronger to close at 102,044.84 basis points.
The uptick recorded in Monday’s trading activity on the local bourse was attributed to bargain hunting and growth in share prices of some heavyweight stocks namely, Dangsugar, Zenithbank, GTCO, Access bank, the newly list Transpower and its parent company, Transcorp and 27 other stocks.
Consequently, the Year-to-date (YTD) returns closed higher at 35.52 per cent. With the overall positive sentiments at the local bourse on Monday, equities investors collectively earned N400 billion as the market capitalization at the close of the day stood at N57.69 trillion.
A total of 436.89 million units of shares with corresponding market value of N17.09 billion were exchanged in 11,344 deals. This is in contrast with the previous day’s data of which shows a 22 per cent improvement in volume, a 14 per cent decline in turnover, but a 5 per cent improvement in deals.
Investors seem to have tilted back to banking stocks as the sector (when measured by volume) took charge of trade activities for the day as GTCO exchanged 96.6 million units of shares with a corresponding market value of N4.02 billion.
Transcorp traded 73.8 million shares at N1.2 billion while Access bank and UBA traded 48.1 million units and 21 million units at N988.3 million and N497.3 million respectively.
In the aggregate, 122 listed equities participated in trading, as measured by market breadth, market sentiment was positive, as 34 tickers gained relative to 16 losers.
On the performance board, Honeywell Flour and NEM Insurance recorded the highest gains of the day, having appreciated in share value by 10.0 per cent each to close at N3.74 and N6.05 per share respectively.
They were followed by Dangote Sugar which recorded 9.97 per cent gain in value of its share price to N61.20 per share while NASCON and Wema bank added 9.92 per cent and 9.79 per cent each to close at N57.60 and N7.85 per share respectively.
Conversely Prestige and Lasaco were the worst performing stocks topping the loser’s chart with depreciation of 10 per cent and 9.83 per cent to close at N0.54 and N2.11 per share respectively. Following closely was UACN and RTBRISCOE which lost 9.68 per cent and 8.16 per cent closing at N12.60 and N0.45 per share while INTENGINS lost 7.74 per cent and finished at N1.55 per share.
