By Dipo Olowookere
The stocks of Dangote Cement and 11 other companies abruptly ended the dreams of the local stock market closing in the green territory on Tuesday.
At a point during the session, the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) was up by over one percent, but the dumping of the cement company’s shares by investors crashed the market by 0.71 percent at the close of transactions.
The losses printed by the 12 stocks reduced the All-Share Index (ASI) by 162.12 points to 22,543.07 points from 22,705.19 points and then depleted the market capitalisation by N84 billion to N11.748 trillion from N11.832 trillion.
Dangote Cement, which is one of the bellwethers of the Nigerian stock market, lost N15.30 on Tuesday to settle at N137.70 per share.
CAP went down by N1.95 to close at N18 per unit, Ardova declined by N1.50 to finish at N13.80 per share, NASCON fell by 95 kobo to N8.55 per share, while International Breweries depreciated by 55 kobo to end at N5.20 per unit.
At the other side, Nigerian Breweries led the gainers’ chart after adding N2.05 to its share price to close at N30 per share, while MTN Nigeria followed with a price appreciation of N1.90 to settle at N95 per share.
Lafarge Africa gained N1 to sell at N11 per unit, Stanbic IBTC rose by 95 kobo to trade at N30.25 per share, while Zenith Bank improved its value by 70 kobo to N13.50 per share.
Business Post reports that the level of activity improved yesterday as investors continued to add more shares to their holdings, resulting in the 22.56 percent rise in the trading volume and 40.03 percent increase in the value of transactions.
When market activities were wrapped up on Tuesday, 675.9 million stocks worth N8.1 billion were traded by investors in 7,368 deals compared with 551.5 million equities valued at N5.8 billion transacted on Monday in 6,981 deals.
Much of these trades were from the banking sector and Zenith Bank was the most attractive to investors during the session, pulling 173.9 million units valued at N2.3 billion.
GTBank traded 131.1 million shares worth N2.8 billion, FBN Holdings exchanged 119.3 million shares for N478.9 million, Access Bank traded 92.0 million stocks valued at N539.1 million, while UBA transacted 31.5 million equities worth N168.9 million.
The sectorial performance yesterday indicated that only the banking and insurance sectors closed in green by 5.59 percent and 0.85 percent respectively.
The industrial goods index fell by 2.16 percent, the energy counter lost 0.61 percent, while the consumer goods index depreciated by 0.04 percent.
Adedapo Adesanya