KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) Tuesday shed huge 661 points or 1.57 per cent in intra-day trading, going as low as 41,370 as disqualified prime minister Nawaz Sharif was elected as president of ruling party Pakistan Muslim League-N.
Market talk doing the rounds today suggested that Nawaz Sharif’s comeback after President Mamnoon Hussain signed the controversial Election Act 2017 into law may have paved way for his political future, but has created further uncertainty in the minds of investors who were already jittery looking at major economic indicators.
The PSX’s KSE-100 Index was Asia’s top-performer in 2016, but has been dominated by the bears this year with correction, political uncertainty and economic worries taking their toll on investors.
Earlier, the PSX opened bearish shedding 141.70 points and also lost 42,000 mark and reach 41877 points level in early trading.
On Monday, the stocks 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.
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, 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.
