Market Closes Flat After Bearish Trend

The Nigerian Exchange Limited closed flat on Wednesday following days of bearish trading.

At the end of the trading, the All-Share index settled at 51,953.41 points. Consequently, year-to-date returns came in at 1.37 per cent while market capitalisation stood at N28.300tn.

Market activities showed that trade turnover waned relative to the previous day’s session, with the volume and value of transactions down by 85.19 per cent and 62.68 per cent respectively. A total of 255,160,869 million units of shares valued at N1.79bn were exchanged in 3,890 deals.

Performance across tracked indices was largely bullish as the insurance, consumer and industrial goods indices led the gainers’ chart up by 0.31 per cent, 0.19 per cent and 0.01 per cent respectively, due to buy interests AIICO (+3.51 per cent) INTBREW (+7.41 per cent) and CUTIX (+3.60 per cent ). On the other side, the Banking index declined by 0.09 per cent, owing to sell pressures in UBA (-1.17 per cent) and FBNH (-0.90 per cent).

Transcorp led the volume chart with 117.53m units while Zenith Bank led the value chart with 11.38m units traded in deals worth N290.04m.

Investors sentiment as measured by market breadth improved reflecting 18 gainers against the 11 decliners.

However, analysts at SCM Capital Limited, stated that the “the current trend of mixed sentiments to continue this week as the market looks for a major catalyst that could spark positive sentiments.”