(Greenwich Merchant Bank): The Local bourse started the week with a loss of 1.11% as the NGX-ASI and market capitalisation declined to 51,400.53 points and NGN27,718.23
million respectively.
Sell-off by investors in large cap equites such as
MTNN (6.99%), UCAP (5.51%), UBA (2.74%) and GTCO (0.24%) contributed to the decline in the market today. Consequently, the Year-to-Date settled at 20.33%.
Sentiment in the market were negative as volume traded witnessed a 51.79% (98.85 million units) decline while the total market turnover also
fell by 17.77% (NGN2,514.70 million). UBA was the most active equity with the highest volume traded while AIRTELAFRI settled for the highest
value traded.
Market breadth closed bearish at 0.77x with thirteen (13) gainers and seventeen (17) losers. Performance across sectors was broadly positive as the Banking sector (1.03%), Industrial sector (0.04%), Consumer Goods sector (0.12%) and Insurance sector (0.05%) all closed positive while Oil & Gas sector (0.03%) recorded the only loss of the day.
Fixed Income Market
The week opened quiet as yields mostly maintained its Friday position across all markets. Specifically in the Bond market, only two(2) instruments (14-Mar-24 & 23-Mar-25) had a marginal decline which did not have an impact on the overall performance of the market. Therefore, the average yields closed at 12.20%, the same figure as Friday.
Also, few instruments were traded in the Nigeria Treasury bills market but had little or no impact in the average performance of the market as average yield maintained its status quo at 7.23%. However, average yield in the OMO market closed down by 0.01% to end the day at 9.04%.
System liquidity improved to a negative balance of NGN25.36billion from NGN63.22 billion. While the Open Buy Back and Overnight rate closed at 14.83% and 15.00%, the same figure as the previous trading day.
Naira appreciated at the Investors’ and Exporters’ Window (I&EW) by NGN2.83/USD to close at NGN427.17/USD from NGN430.00/USD.
Ifunanya Ikueze is an Engineer, Safety Professional, Writer, Investor, Entrepreneur and Educator.
