Daily Times

The market kicked off the day on a positive tone on Thursday, reaching an intraday high of +409 points; however this positivity couldn’t last long as the index came into pressure and made an intraday low of -240 points, closing down 107 points at 40,239 points level.

Thursday’s major heavyweights, namely Lucky Cement gaining 2.94 percent, K-Electric gaining 9.46 percent, Mari Petroleum gaining 1.85 percent, United Bank Limited (UBL) gaining 0.61 percent and Honda Atlas gaining 5 percent cumulatively contributed +95 points to the overall index.

Traded volumes increased by 22 percent over previous day’s session to 143 million shares, while value traded increased to $41 million. Volume leaders were K-Electric with 30.2 million shares traded, Pak Elektron with 14.5 million shares traded and Engro Polymer with 6.6 million shares traded.

Exploration and Production (E&P) sector lost value to close lower than its previous day close as crude oil prices edged lower in the international market after US President message regarding OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) and crude prices.

Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) losing 0.45 percent and Pakistan Oil Fields (POL) losing 0.48 percent were the losers of the mentioned sector.

An equity analyst Maaz Mulla expects the market to remain volatile in the coming sessions, on the back of overall political ambiguities.

Mixed sentiment were witnessed in the cement sector where Lucky Cement and DG Khan Cement closed in the green zone and on the flipside Maple Leaf Cement and Pioneer Cement closed in the red zone.

Similarly, mixed sentiments ware seen in financials where major banking scrips including Habib Bank Limited (HBL), MCB Bank and National Bank of Pakistan closed in the red, while Bank AL-flah , Bank of Punjab and Bankislami managed to close in green.

Shares of 143 companies surged while shares of 163 companies went down amongst total 340 companies’ shares traded on Thursday.

Published in Daily Times, July 6^th 2018.