The biting and excruciating hard times occasioned by scarcity of food and increasing prices of commodities have forced the Nigerian stock market’s capitalisation beyond the threshold of N20 trillion, which it has held for about a year. The equity market lost N516.3 billion to berth at N19.6 trillion last week.
Investors and analysts who spoke with Blueprint said, it is now all about survival. Others said, how do explain a situation where some of the companies are doing great, yet investors appear not to be interested in them?
A lady who has sprinkling of shares in the market said, she is always on the look out for any marginal change in her stock to sell. According to Amaka Okoro, how can you be talking of investment, when food has become a scarce commodity and the prices appear to change on hourly basis?
Yinka Olufemi, another shareholder said, you have to live to face the future. According to him, a situation where water has become like essential commodity, what do you care for in stocks?
Yinkais angry that, market analysts often masquerade the happening simply as either market forces or sell-off pressure.
Of course, the monthly report by Afrinvest said, sell-offs persisted last week in the local bourse, and as such the All Share Index (ASI) slumped 2.6 per cent.
“Downtrend was sustained on the local bourse last week as the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) All-Share Index trended southwards on four of five trading sessions. Consequently, the benchmark index shed 2.6 per cent week-on-week ( w/w) to settle at 37,658.26 points while Year-to-Date (YTD) loss worsened to -6.5 per cent”, said Afrinvest.
Analysts said, the negative performance was largely due to price depreciation in bellwethers – AIRTELAF (-10.0 per cent), DANGCEM (-3.9 per cent), and BUACEMENT (-3.4 per cent).
Activity level waned as average volume and value fell 18.0 per cent and 20.4 per cent respectively to 202.7 million units and N2.4 billion. The top traded stocks by volume were ZENITH (74.2 million), TRANSCORP (62.2 million), and ACCESS (49.0 million) while ZENITH (N1.7 billion), STANBIC (N586.5 million) and MTNN (N534.3 million) were the top traded stocks by value.
