KARACHI: Pakistan equities recovered lost ground on Thursday after taking investors on a roller coaster ride with benchmark KSE-100 Index finishing aggressively over 43,525 levels. The market opened with the gap narrowing down in the morning with select blue chips carrying bearish momentum from late trading yesterday, and denting the KSE-100 Index. The activity, however, was on lower side with investors tracking domestic politics that raised concerns over upcoming Senate polls after the Wednesday ruling by the apex court. Sentiments later began to turn positive as Pakistan Oilfields POL PA +5% hit upper price limit after Pakistan Petroleum Information Service (PPIS) reported significant reserves of oil and gas in a new exploratory field (Jhandial), in which the company holds 80% stake. Engro Corp ENGRO PA also covered back yesterday’s entire decline due to payout disappointment and closed +4.7% up.
However, the bourse boomeranged later on in the session making an intraday high of +708 points as buying interest came from institutional investors in the last hour. Major heavyweights namely HBL (+3.21%), OGDC (+1.00%), UBL (+2.77%), PPL (+2.80%), MCB (+0.09%), ENGRO (+4.68%), LUCK (+1.82%) and HUBC (+1.15%) cumulatively contributed +359 points. Traded volumes marginally increased by 1 percent DoD to 191mn shares, while value traded surged to US$82mn. The top volume stocks were DSL (+3.78%), ANL (-3.09%), LOTCHEM (+1.93%) and FFL (-2.84%). In the E&P sector, PPL (+2.80%) and OGDC (+1.00%) closed in green, where POL (+5%) closed at its upper circuit on the back of reserves data released by PPIS for Dec 2017 where Jhandial’s reserves show a remarkable increase from ~7 year to ~14years. Financials once again took the lead where HBL (+3.21%), UBL (+2.77%), MCB (+0.09%) and NBP (+1.08%) closed in the green zone. UBL redeemed investor’s interest today as the bank gave clarification over the disclosure given in its Annual Report related to its operations in New York. Moving forward, we expect market to remain under pressure due to the last day of rollover week.
Seeing market to build on today’s momentum and inch further up with KSE-100 Index likely testing and possibly crossing 44K psychological barrier.
Published in Daily Times, February 23rd 2018.