October 18, (THEWILL) – Investors’ preference for banks’ stocks on Tuesday drove the equities market into positive territory, recording a gain of N158 billion at the end of the day’s trading.
Recovering from the previous session’s loss, the domestic bourse posted gains as the benchmark index rose by 0.43% to close at 67,326.12 points against 67,037.93 points on Monday.
Market capitalisation rose to N36.98 trillion against N36.83 trillion, yielding a gain of N158 billion to reverse the previous day’s loss.
Gains in Tier-1 financial services institutions namely, Zenith Bank (+2.64% on N37.15 price), GTCO (+1.15% against N14 share price) and Stanbic IBTC (+5.56% against N72 per share) contributed to outweigh losses in Nigerian Breweries (-7.38% from N42 price), Ecobank Transnational (-1.30% from N16.35) and palm oil giant Presco (-0.55% against N182 share price), keeping the market in the green.
Consequently, the year-to-date (YTD) return rose to 31.37%, while market capitalization gained ₦158.34bn to close at ₦36.99trn.
Analysis of today’s market activities showed trade turnover settled higher relative to the previous session, with the value of transactions up by 45.57%.
A total of 377.97m shares valued at ₦5.17bn were exchanged in 6,729 deals. UBA (+3.06%) led the volume and value charts with 42.30m units traded in deals worth ₦796.36m.
Market breadth closed positive at a 1.44-to-1 ratio with advancing issues outnumbering declining ones. Julius Berger (+10.00%), topped twenty-two (22) others on the leader’s table, while Multiverse (-9.49%) led fifteen (15) others on the laggard’s group.
Sam Diala is a Bloomberg Certified Financial Journalist with over a decade of experience in reporting Business and Economy. He is Business Editor at THEWILL Newspaper, and believes that work, not wishes, creates wealth.
