Investors divert capital to primary offerings
KATHMANDU, DEC 16:
As investors diverted capital to primary market transaction, secondary market plunged by 33 per cent.
Civil Bank’s Initial Public Offering worth Rs 800 million was oversubscribed by about five times in four days according to initial reports. The overwhelming response to the public offering of the bank, however, affected stock trading which recorded a loss of 0.43 points.
Transaction volume in the week recorded only one–third of the trading witnessed a week back. In five trading days, the market witnessed trading of 1.03 million unit shares worth Rs 342 million of 115 companies in 4836 transactions.
Last week, trading worth Rs 515 million was undertaken.
Stock trading of class ‘A’ companies accounted for 57.93 per cent of the total trading, amounting to Rs 198.4 million. The sensitive index that measures the performance of blue chip stocks went down by 3.06 points. The indicator of the performance of actual shares traded — float index — slumped by 0.21 points reaching 34.98 points. The market opened at 497.67 points on Sunday morning and slid to 488.15 points by the closing. The next day too, the index went down reaching 487.81 points. However, in the next three days, the index started to rise. The surge led the index to 497.24 points on the last trading day of the week.
Insurance and hydropower companies registered the highest gains in the week. Insurance went up by 19.75 points and hydropower gained 11.81 points as Butwal Power Company’s share price went up by Rs 45. Likewise, the development bank subgroup also gained 6.56 points, while finance companies registered a gain of 0.71 points.
Commercial banks and hotels ended up in the red. Commercial banks lost 0.16 points. As Soaltee Hotel lost Rs 10 per unit share, hotels went down by 16.07 points.
This week too Nepal Investment Bank was the forerunner in terms of trading volume with trading of shares worth Rs 37.8 million. In terms of number of shares traded, Nepal Bangladesh Bank was the forerunner with trading of 115,020 unit shares. Global IME Bank topped in terms of number of transactions with 328 transactions.
Source: THT
