Inching 13bps upwards, the Nigerian equities market on Thursday has been able to shake-off three days of consecutive losses to close at 25,936.24.
Bargain hunting in banking stocks prodded the benchmark index forward, while the YTD losses receded to 3.5%. The positive performance was however primarily driven by gains in STANBIC (+2.9%), UBA (+2.9%), ZENITH (+1.4%) and GUARANTY (+0.6%).
With regards activity levels, there was a wane in both volume and value traded. Both decreased 50.3% and 12.0% to settle at 151.5m units and N1.4bn respectively. Conversely, market capitalization gained N11.5bn to settle at N9.0tn.
The market breadth rose to 0.2x (from 0.3x yesterday), indicating an improvement in investor sentiment. This came on the back of 20 advancing stocks against 17 decliners. Leading the band of 20 were UNITYBANK (+5.0), OANDO (+4.8%) and CONTINSURE (+4.7%) while FORTE on account of a 9.7% drop led the decliners, trailed by PROP (-9.4%) and TRANSCORP (-5.0%).
Finally, analysis by sector showed a generally bullish performance. The Oil & Gas index posted the only decline (1.6%), this was on account of losses in FORTE (-9.7%) and SEPLAT (3bps). These far outweighed gains in OANDO (+4.8%). Moving on, the Industrial Goods index closed flat while the Banking index gained the most (+0.9%). The Insurance and Consumer Goods indices similarly closed in the green, at 0.6% and 2bps higher
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