The Nigerian equities market experienced sustained declining trading trend this week, as the NGX-ASI recorded a 0.22% depreciation on Friday to close at 97,432.02 points.
Data on the day’s trading showed that the ASI’s decline was driven by a sell-off in ARADEL (-10.00%), JAIZBANK (-4.66%), and UBA (-2.68%), amongst other blue chip stocks.
As a result of the bearish momentum, the year-to-date (YTD) return stood at 30.30%, with a market capitalization loss of N132.8 billion, and which settled at N59.03 trillion.
The market breadth returned 0.74x with 34 decliners compared to 24 gainers further indicating more selling pressure than buying pressure.
Specifically, the data indicated that ARADEL topping the losers’ chart premium at 10% decline, which suggested that investors continued to react negatively to the stock price as the stock has lost over 36.59% from its launching date till now.
Despite the slump in ARADEL, the NGXASI UD ratio closed at 4.57x, after factoring in the 540.82 million units of FIDELITYBK traded in today’s session, thereby making the lender’s stock to account for 60.85% of the total volume traded.
As has been the case through the trading sessions this week, there was mixed sentiment on the sectorial performance, as two-sector indexes closed in the red zone. The Oil and Gas sector led the losers’ chart as it declined by 0.07% driven by sell-offs in ARADEL, JAPAULGOLD and MRS. The sector was followed by the Industrial Goods sector, which marginally declined by 0.01% due to profit taken of 0.26% in WAPCO (LAFARGE).
Conversely, the Banking, Consumer Goods, and Insurance sectors appreciated by 1.15%, 0.23% and 0.15% respectively.
