Analysts at Bancorp Securities Limited, one of Nigeria’s leading investment research and consulting firms, on Monday predicted that the nation’s equities market would sustain its positive momentum this week as investors will rev up search for value-yielding stocks with good potential for return on their investments.
The investment researchers, in the firm’s ‘Weekly Stock Recommendations: Nov 28th– Dec 2nd, 2022’ circulated to our correspondent on Monday, based this week’s forecast and recommendations on the recent performance of the bourse as well as investors’ appetite to explore opportunities for improved gains ahead of FY 2022 earnings season.
The experts predicted: “We expect market performance to remain positive as early birds take position in dividend-paying stocks ahead of FY 2022 earnings season.”
As a result of the projection, the investment experts recommended four stocks, namely ZENITH, GTCO, MTNN and WAPCO as strong buy for the week in view of the listed firms’ performances in recent months.
The Bancorp Securities’ analysts partly based their stance on GTCO to the Group’s “balance sheet remained well structured and resilient even as its Strong Capital Ratios and asset quality were sustained as CAR, NPL ratio, and Cost of Risk (COR) closed at 20.7%, 5.6%, and 0.2% in September 2022, amongst other performance indices.
The analysts recalled that in spite of the 100 basis points hike in the Monetary Policy Rate to 16.5%, which represents a cumulative 500bps in the year 2022, the local bourse for another consecutive week witnessed an improved momentum at the end of trading on Friday.
Consequently, the NGX benchmark index surged 6.9% w/w to 47,554.34 points while the market capitalization inched higher to N25.90 trillion.
Investment experts attributed the upbeat in market performance to price gains in most of the bellwether stocks, namely NB, AIRTELAFRI, DANGCEM and BUACEMENT, thereby boosting investors’ gain to N1.67 trillion in profits while the market’s year-to-date (YTD) return rose to 11.33%.
At the close of the trading session last Friday, the level of trading activities was up as the total volume traded increased by 2.90% w/w to 0.71 million units while the total value traded increased significantly by 76.93% w/w to N15.34 billion.
On sectorial performance, the market’s trend showed that the Industrial sector emerged as the leading advancer (+9.16%) due to price appreciation in DANGCEM BUACEMENT and WAPCO.
Similarly, the Insurance and Banking indices also closed positive by +5.06% and +3.06% respectively on the back of increase in price of ACCESSCORP, ETI, GTCO, SOVEREIGN TRUST, PRESTIGE and CORNERST. The Consumer Goods gained (+0.15%) due to gains recorded in BUA FOODS, HONEYWELL and PZ.
However, the Oil & Gas index dipped following price decline in SEPLAT and TOTAL.
