KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) witnessed an exceptionally dull session on first trading day of the week as the benchmark KSE 100-index lost 390 points and closed at 42,019 points.
Activity was slowest in over two years; first day of October saw only $38.2m (down 26% d/d) exchanging hands as ex-Prime Minister made a court appearance.
Index point laggers were HBL (down 2.6%), MCB (2.6%), LUCK (2.6%), UBL (1.7%) & HUBC (1.4%) taking away 200 points; while PSEL (up 4.9%), THALL (2.5%), NML (1.4%), NCL (5%) & FFBL (up 2.6%) added 50 points. On the sector front, banks took away 192 points, some participants had higher expectations of inflation as a trigger that may have warranted rate hike (reverse of which occurred), however we opine low volumes & foreign pressure as culprit behind banks underperformance.
Market participants said CPI numbers for the month of Sep-2017 were released yesterday that clocked in at 3.86%. Selling pressure was also witnessed in the cement sector where LUCK (down 2.60%), CHCC (1.73%), FCCL (2.00%) and POWER (1.94%) closed in the red trajectory.
Scrips of total 378 active companies were traded in the session of which 254 concluded in the decline, 109 in advance while 15 remained unchanged.
Average daily volume shrunk by 49% DoD to 89m shares along with average traded value that clocked in at Rs4b/USD38m, down by 26% DoD. Volume leaders were CWSM (6.3%), TRG (6.3%), NCL (5.2%), KEL (5.1%) and BGL (4.4%), contributing 27.4% of total volume.
