Daily Times

Pakistan equities remained positive throughout the session Friday as the KSE-100 Index appeared to not be fazed by the arrival of Nawaz Sharif in Lahore.

The Benchmark KSE-100 index continued its upward streak with positive sentiments as the market closed the session in green with gain of +395.88 points to record at 40271 points.

The Bull Run witnessed on local bourse as it registered a surge of 1 percnet. This Bull Run primarily led by indexed heavy sector banking on the back of anticipation of another 50-bps hike in policy rate.

Excitement was mostly attributable to the gains in banking stocks like Habib Bank Limited (HBL) with 5 percent gains, United Bank Limited (UBL) with 4.99 percent gains , MCB with 5 percent advancement , Allied Bank Limited (ABL) with 5 percent increase and Bank Alflah (BAHL) with 3.83 percent surge in value as most market participants are expecting hike in policy rate.

“We are expecting 50bps hike in monetary policy announcement today, which is inline with market consensus”, said an analyst at Ismail Iqbal Securities.

Traded volumes increased by 12 percent to 124.7 shares traded over 108.4 million shares traded in previous day’s session while value traded too increased by 18.75 percent to Rs 5.7 billion. Volume leaders were Bank of Punjab with 18.6 million shares traded, Engro Polymer with 5.5 million shares traded and K-Electric with 5.4 million shares traded.

Negative sentiments were witnessed in the cement sector where almost all major cement scrips including, DG Khan Cement, Attock Cement, Fauji Cement, Dewan Cemnet closed in the red zone while Fecto Cement, Lucky Cement and Gahribwal Cement managed to close in green.

The advance to decline ratio in the broader market remained in the favor of bulls, total 315 scrips participated, 179 of them advanced, 117 declined while 19 scrips remained unchanged.

Published in Daily Times, July 14^th 2018.