KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) Wednesday witnessed a bullish day after Wall Street recovery as the benchmark KSE-100 index gained 211 points to close at 44,096 level.
The benchmark gained almost 390 points within the first few minutes of the trading session. It hit a day’s high of 44,299.87 points soon after trading commenced, whereas the session’s opening at 43,885 points remained the day’s lowest point.
Volumes edged up, with 270 million shares worth Rs11.3 billion changing hands compared to 238 million shares worth Rs8.5bn traded yesterday. Of the 379 traded scrips, 169 advanced, 186 declined and 24 remained unchanged.
Investors tracked international markets that somewhat recovered after witnessing sharp losses, said Elixir Securities.
Though the market kicked off on a positive note, however, the index couldn’t sustain that level for long, the report read. It added that institutional buying was evident in select names with United Bank UBL PA +2.5pc leading gains in the financial, sector while the Oil and Gas Development Company OGDC PA +1.7pc being the star performer from the E&Ps sector.
Overall engineering scrips dominated trading with 36.4m shares traded, while the communication and textile sectors followed with 36.0m and 26.2m shares changing hands.
On Tuesday, the stocks nosedived, shedding over 800 points in the initial hours of the trading session, however recovering later to finally close down to 43,886 points, declining by 416 points at the end of the day. This hysteria was due to massive losses posted by the US stocks tumbling markets across the globe on the back of rising bond yield.
Traded volumes plunged by 16 percent DoD to 238 million shares while value traded fell to $77 million. Top volume stocks were ANL (6.5 percent), TRG (5.0 percent), LOTCHEM (2.4 percent) and SSGC (1.0 percent). Pressure was witnessed in all the sectors across the board. From the cement sector, PIOC (-3.5 percent), KOHC (-3.0 percent), LUCK (-2.6 percent), DGKC (-2.4 percent), MLCF (-1.1 percent) and CHCC (-0.7 percent) shed 80 points cumulatively and closed down in red. Moreover from the E&P sector, OGDC (-0.8 percent), PPL (-1.4 percent) and POL (-1.7 percent) closed in the red. Moving forward, experts expect market to remain volatile in the near term with flows from the local institutions and foreigners directing the market.
