June 2 (Lagos) - The All-Share Index slipped by 6bps today as the Naira continued to weaken in the parallel market causing anxiety among investors over another looming devaluation. The CBN has continuously devalued the Naira but they have not been able to unify the official or parallel rates within an acceptable band of 3% even after the devaluations.
Today's sell off was slight and led by selloffs on select tickers in the oil & gas and consumer goods space. The benchmark index lost 23.51 absolute points to close the session at 38,414.37. On the brewer’s counter today —
INTBREW (-2.73%) and
CHAMPION (-9.91%) dropped points while losses printed by
SEPLAT (-1.16%) dragged broad market performance.
Meanwhile, in the insurance space,
WAPIC (+9.43%), CHIPLC (+9.09%), SOVERNINS (+7.41%) and
LASACO (+6.94%) all added points — lifting the NGX Insurance Index by 1.51%. Overall, year-to-date (YTD) return retreated to -4.61%, while market capitalization dipped by N 12.2 billion to close at N 20.02 trillion.
Today, market activities closed relatively on a higher note, with volume and value of trades advancing by 36.2% and 24.2% respectively. A total of 274 million units of shares — valued at N 2.63 billion were traded in 4,159 deals.
UCAP (-3.72%) led the volume chart with 23 million units traded while
ZENITHBANK (-0.65%) led the value chart with deals worth over N 470 million.
Market breadth closed negative at 1.06-to-1 ratio with advancing issues outnumbering declining ones.
MORISON (+9.57%) topped seventeen (17) others on the gainer's log while
CHAMPION (-9.91%) led sixteen (16) others on the laggard's table.
The slight sell off from today could gain momentum towards the end of the week as fears over the next devaluation increase especially as there has been no bounce back in the parallel market following the latest devaluation of the Naira.
reporting for easykobo.com on tuesday, June 2 2021 from Lagos, Nigeria