Daily Times

Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) achieved its highest closing level in history on Thursday amid strong buying spree, with the benchmark KSE-100 Index gaining 594.34 points (+0.89 percent) to close at 67,142.12 points. The market opened on a positive note and remained in the green throughout the session. The experts have attributed the rally to the advancement in the privatisation of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and progress on a new bailout programme. The IMF and Pakistani authorities reached a staff-level agreement on the second and last review of the $3 billion Stand By Arrangement (SBA) last week. Subject to IMF board approval, Pakistan will have access to around $1.1 billion. The two sides also remain engaged in negotiating a new programme to resolve Pakistan’s fiscal and external sustainability weaknesses. Meanwhile, global index provider FTSE Russell, despite concerns, has kept Pakistan’s status as a secondary emerging market in its latest review. However, it also kept Pakistan on the watch list for possible demotion from secondary emerging to Frontier market status amid a decline in its index weight over the past few years. The benchmark index traded in a range of 555.08 points, showing an intraday high of 67,246.02 points and an intraday low of 66,690.94 points. Among other indices, the KSE All Share Index gained 395.20 points (+0.89 percent) to close at 44,470.32 points. Similarly, the KMI All Share Islamic Index gained 216.97 points (+0.69 percent) to close at 31,555.72 points. Total volumes traded for the KSE-100 Index remained 231.31 million shares, while the overall market volumes remained 421.12 million shares. Among scrips, PTC topped the volumes with 55.72 million shares, followed by LOTCHEM (27.23 million) and TELE (25.55 million). Stocks that contributed significantly to the volumes included PTC, LOTCHEM, TELE, WTL and TPLP, which formed over 34 percent of total volumes. A total of 350 companies traded shares in the stock exchange, out of which shares of 211 closed up, shares of 110 companies closed down while shares of 29 companies remained unchanged. A total of 97 companies traded shares in the KSE-100 Index, out of which share prices of 71 companies closed up, 25 companies closed down and one remained unchanged. The number of total trades remained 169,911, while the value traded remained Rs16.16 billion.