July 13, (THEWILL) – The Naira witnessed an upward momentum on Thursday, gaining 4.7% against the dollar on the I&E window to close at N746.28/$ against N782.49/$ on the previous trading day.
Check by THEWILL showed that the parallel market is still waxing “strong” in its competition with the official market where convergence had occurred since the floating of the Naira on June 14, 2023.
Parallel market rate Thursday was N805/$ – a N58 gap between the two channels which is significant enough to keep the black market traders in business.
The aggregator, FMDQ, had not published the turnover for Thursday at the time of filing this report by 6.30pm.
On the equities side, he local stock market racked up further loss in today’s trading session as sell pressures on MTNN (-4.6% a drop from share price of N265.10) and some banking stocks weighed down the bourse, causing the All-Share Index to plunge by 2.0% to 62,748.94 points from 64,046.93 points on Wednesday.
Market capitalisation dropped to N34.167 trillion from N34,874 trillion on Wednesday, implying that investors suffered a N707 billion loss.
Accordingly, the Month-to-Date and Year-to-Date returns moderated to +2.9% and +22.4%, respectively.
The total volume traded declined by 31.4% to 798.47 million units, valued at NGN10.45 billion, and exchanged in 10,296 deals. UBA was the most traded stock by volume at 99.02 million units, while GTCO was the most traded stock by value at NGN1.77 billion.
Sectoral performance remained negative, as the Banking (-6.6%), Insurance (-4.1%), Oil & Gas (-0.7%), and Consumer Goods (-0.1%) indices declined, while the Industrial Goods (+0.7%) index advanced.
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.
