Daily Times

Pakistan equities closed Monday positive with benchmark KSE100 Index settling above 42,800 levels, +0.71 percent day-on-day (DoD).

Market opened sideways in early hours however later select names across Chemicals, Cements and Financials pushed up KSE-100 Index. Engro Corporation (ENGRO) gaining 2.5 percent, Lucky Cement (LUCK) gaining 2.6 percent and Dawood Hercules (DAWH) gaining 3.1 percent stood out as the top contributors to the Benchmark Index, cumulatively adding 117 points. However, amidst lack of news flow and absence of any meaningful corporate result announcements, wider market activity was subpar as only $ 54 million worth of shares exchanged hands on KSE All share Index, while KSE-100 Index traded 77 million shares, the lowest activity in almost 2 weeks.

Murtaza Jafar, an equity analyst at Elixir Securities expects market to closely track news flow on nomination of key government positions for the upcoming Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaaf (PTI) government that will help investor sentiments.

Traded volumes went down by 24.6 percent day-on-day (DoD) to 284 million as against 202 million shares traded on previous day while value traded decreased 29 percent to $ 66 million as compared to $ 93 million of previous trading session.

Top volume stocks were Trust Inv Bank with 11.07 million turnovers, Pak Elektron with 9.9 million shares turnover and Unity Foods wit 7.9 million shares exchanging in hands.

Published in Daily Times, August 7^th 2018.