Daily Times

Pakistan stock market recovered in Thursday’s session, making an intraday high of +304 points to close at 39,090, up 169 points.

Market initially traded higher (up to +305 points) led by positive news flow on satisfactory remarks by FATF over Pakistan’s action plans given to curtail money laundering and terror financing; however lackluster participation and choppy behavior led the market to skid lower particularly during the last hour of the day.

All sectors contributed positive with the heavyweight commercial banks and E&Ps cumulatively contributing +186 points to the KSE-100 index.

HBL (+0.4%), UBL (+1.1%), MCB (+1.0%), ABL (+0.6%), POL (+1.9%), PPL (+3.3%) and OGDC (+2.4%) were the major contributors from the aforementioned sectors.

Cement sector closed lower than its previous day as investor’s opted to book profits, where major players such as DGKC (-1.1%), FCCL (-1.1%), MLCF (-1.8%) and PIOC (-1.8%) all closed in the red zone.

Average daily traded value stood at $33 million, down 22 percent and volume stood at 112 million shares, down 16 percent. Furthermore, major contribution to total market volume came from BOP (+1.0%) and PAEL (-0.8%), which led the volumes with more than 19 million shares exchanging hands.

An equity analyst Maaz Mulla expects market to remain positive and recommend investors to accumulate stocks from the cement and banking sectors.

Total volume stood at 112 million shares in All Share Index where retail names ruled the volume charts. Oil & Gas Development Company (OGDC) gaining 2.39 percent and Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) gaining 3.29 percent remained amongst the major contributors to gains in KSE-100 on the back of increase in international crude oil prices.

An analyst at Elixir Research Murtaza Jafar expects market to consolidate within 38,600 – 39,200 until upcoming Mini Budget due on 14th January.

Published in Daily Times, January 11^th 2019.