The Nigerian stock market last week recorded the most advancement among its other equity markets in the world. It’s All Share Index (ASI) rose by 5.6 per cent.
The closest to Nigeria is India’s BSE Sens index, one of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India China and South Africa) which rose by 4.7 per cent. The America’s NASDAQ in the developed market gained 4.0 per cent.
In Nigeria, investors were attracted by the currently low market valuation amidst the continued low yield environment in the fixed income space. The performance also reflects an improvement in risk appetite despite looming uncertainty surrounding the business terrain due to the pandemic.
Furthermore, trading opened the week positive on Monday (+2.1 per cent) while Tuesday was met with a whopping 4.9 per cent gain (the highest on record since April 2015), due to buying interest in DANGCEM, MTNN and ZENITH.
However, the market shed gains in subsequent sessions as some investors booked profit. Consequently, the All-Share index rose 5.6 per cent week-on-week (w/w) to 28,415.31 points, market capitalisation hit N14.9 trillion (N777.9 billion w/w) while Yrar-to-Date (YTD) return settled at 5.9 per cent.
Capturing the pick-up in activity level, average volume and value traded advanced 87.9 per cent and 82.3 per cent to 376.3 million units and N3.9 billion respectively. The banking stocks were the most active as ZENITH (530.7 million units), FBNH (287.9 million units) and UBA (273.6 million units) led by volume while ZENITH (N10.5 billion), GUARANTY (N5.3 billion) and UBA (N1.9 billion) led by value.
Sector performance was impressive as all sectors under our coverage gained w/w. The AFR-ICT and Banking indices gained the most, up 8.0 per cent and 7.8 per cent respectively due to buy interest in MTNN (+8.1%) and AIRTELAF (+7.9%) as well as FBNH (+19.2 per cent) and ACCESS (+18.4 per cent).
