Daily Times

Pakistan stock market fell by 917 points soon after the arrest of Pakistan Muslim League Leader Shahbaz Sharif.

According to the initial updates, PSX-100 index reached 40,783 on Monday today.

The Lahore High Court (LHC) rejected the interim bail of PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif in a money laundering case after which the NAB arrested Shahbaz Sharif.

The benchmark KSE-100 Index went down by 1,056.41 points during the closing hours, marking its intraday low at 40,644.82 points.

Overall, 407.17 million shares were traded today, while 282.06 million shares were traded in KSE-100. Shares of 382 companies were traded overall. At the end of the day, 56 closed higher, 315 declined and 11 remained unchanged.

By the time trading was closed, the KSE-100 Index stood at 40,740.95 after shedding 960.28 points, which means that all the gains made by the market this month have been wiped out. The index had closed August at 41,110.93.

The selloff meant the 315 companies shed their share prices with only 56 managing some gains. There was no change in the value of 11.

So the being on the list of most active stocks wasn’t a good idea at all as nine out of the top 10 companies suffered losses. The only exception was TRG Pakistan Limited which made 1.13 percent gain after trading 34,511,000 shares.

The overall market volumes declined from 435 million shares in the previous session to 407.2 million shares (-6pc). Average traded value also declined by 7pc, from $92.9 million to $86.1 million. Hascol Petroleum Ltd (HASCOL -6.44pc), TRG Pakistan Ltd (TRG +1.13pc) and K-Electric Ltd (KEL -0.24pc) led the volume chart, exchanging 48.69 million, 34.54 million and 30.21 million shares, respectively.

Sectors that painted the benchmark index red included banking (-227.28 points), cement (-137.14 points) and fertilizer (-75.01 points). Among the companies, Habib Bank Ltd (HBL -78.81 points), Mari Petroleum Company Ltd (MARI -46.52 points) and Bank AL Habib Ltd (BAHL -43.54 points) dented the index the most.

Shedding 7.50pc from its cumulative market capitalization, the refinery sector ended as the session’s top loser, with Byco Petroleum Pakistan Ltd (BYCO -7.81pc), Attock Refinery Ltd (ATRL -6.77pc), National Refinery Ltd (NRL -7.27pc) and Pakistan Refinery Ltd (PRL -7.32pc) closing in the negative.