Profit booking by investors pushes stock index down
KATHMANDU, 8 Sep: The stock market could not sustain the previous week’s gain as investors tried to book profit on earlier gains this week — September 1 to 6.
The benchmark index slumped by 4.48 points as investors wanted to cash in on last week’s surge in the market. Despite, the dividend announcements of the listed companies most investors seemed to be in a hurry to book profit.
On Sunday afternoon, the market had opened at 551.44 points, which crawled up a bit to 551.63 points by the time the market closed. The next day, the index retreated to 550.36 points.
As the index seemed to be heading south, investors jumped in to book profit before share prices slumped further. By the end of the week, the continuous decline pushed the benchmark index to 546.55 points.
Weekly share update.
The stock exchange witnessed its transaction volume increase by 140 per cent, thanks to the block transaction of Nepal Bangladesh Bank’s shares worth more than Rs 754 million. The bank’s 2.9 million unit shares owned by the promoter group was purchased by Bangladesh-based IFIC Bank. More shares of the bank will be transferred to IFIC Bank in two more rounds soon.
The transaction volume was recorded at Rs 2.09 billion, including the block transfer, this week. Last week, the volume stood at Rs 872 million.
This week, 6.2 million units of shares were traded in 9400 transactions, while there were 8234 number of transactions recorded for 2.6 million unit shares last week.
Share trading of blue chip stocks belonging to the class ‘A’ group comprised of 41.98 per cent of total transaction, amounting to Rs 884.6 million. The sensitive index that shows the performance of class ‘A’ stocks slumped by 1.71 points. Likewise, the float index that measures the performance of shares actually traded also went down by 0.2 points to 38.51 points.
This week, hotels, trading, finance companies and insurance ended up registering gains in the stock market.
Insurance was the biggest earner of the week that went up by 22.58 points as LIC Nepal gained Rs 194 per unit and National Life Insurance earned Rs 10 per unit share, among others. Hotels registered a gain of 5.81 points, as Oriental Hotels gained Rs 21 per share.
Likewise, Salt Trading Corporation’s share price went up by Rs four, pushing the trading subgroup up by 0.41 points. Finance companies also registered a gain of 1.93 points.
Hydropower was the biggest loser of the week as the plunge in share prices of Chilime Hydropower by Rs 42 per unit and Butwal Power Company by Rs 10 per unit pulled the subgroup down by 28.68 points.
Nepal Telecom lost Rs two per unit share and pulled the others subgroup down by 2.35 points. Likewise, Unilever’s loss of Rs 200 got the manufacturing subgroup down by 10.38 points.
Despite the series of dividend announcements, commercial banks and development banks also declined by 7.29 points and 4.48 points, respectively.
This week too, Nepal Bangladesh Bank topped the charts in terms of transaction volume and shares traded with trading of 3.2 million units of shares worth Rs 866.1 million. It was also the forerunner in terms of number of transactions with 775 transactions.
The top five companies this week in terms of transaction volume were Nepal Bangladesh Bank (Rs 866.18 million), Nabil Bank (Rs 397.7 million), Chilime Hydropower Company (Rs 85.90 million), Kumari Bank (Rs 85.35 million) and Everest Bank (Rs 70.82 million).
Source: THT
