KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange remained bearish till midday as the benchmark 100-index shed 26 points to reach 39445 level on Tuesday.
Earlier, the stocks opened bearish after a long weekend and shed 178 points to drop to 39293 level in early trading.
Last week, the market witnessed some recovery in the end, helping index close in the green zone after five weeks of consecutive red closings.
Bottom fishing in heavyweight stocks helped KSE-100 index record increase of 825pts (+2.1 percent WoW) to close at 39,471. This also coincided with news of PSX looking to introduce Category B that will include companies eligible for margin trading system and deliverable futures. Foreign institutional investors (net selling of $5m during the week) and banks (net selling of $4m) continued to offload positions amidst ambiguous political and economic climate.
Overall activity remained weak with average traded value of $52m/day (down 14 percent WoW), however average traded volume inched up to 138m shares/day (+2 percent WoW). Most of value buying activity remained concentrated into heavyweight sectors such as (1) banks (+5 percent WoW), (2) fertilizers (+3 percent WoW), (3) cements (+3 percent WoW) and (4) oil and gas marketing (+2 percent WoW). On the other hand, sectors such as (1) food and personal care (down 3 percent WoW) and (2) refinery (down 1 percent WoW) etc. witnessed declines.
Foreign investors remained net sellers during the week with $5.4m selling, however, this was easily absorbed by local investors where individuals ($2m) and insurance companies ($1.6m) emerged as the largest buyers on the local front. Most of the foreign selling was witnessed in cement ($6.5m) and textile ($1.1m) sectors whereas fertilizer ($3.8m) and oil & gas ($1.3m) sectors attracted inflows. On sectoral front, banks (+5 percent WoW), industrial metals (+5 percent WoW) and engineering (+3 percent WoW) closed on a positive note whereas food producers (-3 percent WoW) ended the week on a negative note.
