Stock market ends stable after early day losses

Stock market ends stable after early day losses

KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Thursday witnessed selling and lost around 363 points. But it recovered by end of the day.

The benchmark KSE-100 index closed at 47,312 points as against previous day’s close of 47,318 points, showing a decline of 6 points.

Analysts at Arif Habib Limited said that the market lost another 363 points during the session today, however, covered a lot of ground and ended the session -6 points.

Banks, E&P, Cement, Power and Technology sectors saw selling pressure on the concern of lockdown as well as rollover positions, whereby investors preferred selling in ready market and bought futures.

LUCK saw abrupt movement where the stock price remained depressed the entire session, moved up in the half closing hour and saw a major sell-off in the closing minute to end at the lowest price of the session.

Among scrips, WTL led the volumes with 49.5 million shares, followed by BYCO (47.1 million) and UNITY (16.1 million).

Sectors contributing to the performance include Banks (-40 points), Chemical (+19 points), Refinery (+12 points), Autos (+12 points), Fertilizer (+12 points) and Inv Banks (+11 points).

Volumes increased from 365.7 million shares to 376.4 million shares (+3 per cent DoD). Average traded value declined slightly by 0.4 per cent to reach US$ 75.7 million as against US$ 75.8 million.

Stocks that contributed significantly to the volumes include WTL, BYCO, UNITY, FFBL and HUMNL, which formed 36 per cent of total volumes.

Stocks that contributed positively to the index include THALL (+13 points), EFERT (+12 points), LUCK (+11 points), DAWH (+9 points) and ICI (+8 points). Stocks that contributed negatively include HBL (-32 points), UBL (-9 points), HCAR (-9 points), ANL (-6 points) and PSMC (-5 points).