Equities market halts losing streak, records first gain in February

The equities market rebounded on Thursday, ending a run of eight successive declines to close higher.

The recent bearish sentiment in the equities market is highly connected to an uptick in yields at the fixed income market. The increase in returns of Nigerian debt has seen investors switching out of equities to position for higher yields in the bond market.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), last week, raised the rates on its high-yielding Open Market Operations (OMO) securities, which is targeted at foreign investors to boost dollar inflows.

Also, the rate on 364-day treasury bills jumped on Wednesday’s auction to 4 percent from previous 2 percent.

On Thursday, bargain buying in bellwether stocks of Dangote Cement, the most capitalised stock, saw it gain 7 percent, and MTNN gained 1.6 percent.

At the close of trading, the all share index (ASI), the benchmark index, inched higher by 0.78 percent to 41,014.30 points. The Month-to-Date loss moderated to -3.3 percent, while the Year-to-Date gain increased to +1.9 percent.

The total volume of trades increased by 247.4 percent to 1.27 billion units, valued at N6.40 billion, and exchanged in 6,573 deals.

TRANSCORP was the most traded stock by volume at 55.75 million units, while MTNN was the most traded stock by value at N1.57 billion.

Performance across sectors was broadly negative, as four out of our five coverage indices — banking (-3.0 percent), insurance (-2.9 percent), oil & gas (-0.9 percent) and consumer goods (-0.3 percent) recorded losses.

The industrial goods (+2.6) index was the lone gainer of the day.