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At the close of Wednesday’s trading session at the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX), the domestic bourse All-Share Index (ASI) declined by 1.88 percent to close at 53,018.97 basis points amid sustained profit-taking activity.
Specifically, share prices of mid- and large-cap stocks such as Airtel Africa, Flour Mills of Nigeria, FCMB Group, Unilever and First Bank of Nigeria Holdings depreciated by 10.00 percent, 4.84 percent, 3.75 percent, 3.33 percent and 0.45 percent, respectively.
Thus, the Month-to-Date loss increased to -2.2 percent, while the Year-to-Date gain fell to +3.5 percent.
Owing to the persistent bearish sentiment, equities investors, lost N553.71 billion as the market capitalisation closed at N28.88 trillion on Wednesday.
As measured by market breadth, market sentiment was negative as 14 tickers lost relative to 11 gainers.
On the performance board, Airtel Africa and Ikeja Hotel recorded the highest losses of the day having depreciated in share values by 10.0 percent and 9.9 percent, respectively; while Wapic Insurance and Mutual Benefits topped the gainers’ list having appreciated by 7.5 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively.
Sectorial performance was however, positive as three of the five sub-sector gauges tracked closed northwards; the NGX Banking, NGX Insurance, NGX Oil/Gas, and NGX Industrial indices rose by 0.49 percent, 0.88 percent, 0.12 percent, and 0.04 percent, respectively. On the other hand, the NGX Consumer Goods index fell by 0.26 percent.
In the broad and narrow markets, the NGX Premium index gained 10 basis points, while the NGX Mainboard and NGX-30 indexes decreased by 332 basis points, and 174 basis points, respectively.
Activities at the bourse were unimpressive as analysis of market activities showed that trade turnover settled lower relative to the previous session, with the value of transactions down by 12.78 percent.
A total of 197.33 million shares valued at N2.67 billion were exchanged in 3,506 deals. United Bank for Africa led the volume chart with 64.20 million units traded, while Airtel Africa led the value chart in deals worth N536.80 million.
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