Trading in the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) reflected bearish sentiment today as the market breadth fell to 1.28x from the previous day’s 1.36x evidenced by 32 stocks recording gains compared to 25 declining stocks.
Data from the Nigerian Exchange Group on the trading indices showed that the Up/Down (UD) ratio closed at 0.18, underscoring the dominance of profit-taking activity in the local bourse.
Though WEMABANK accounted for 50.35% of the day’s trading activity, the lender’s stock still depreciated by 1.79%, and the sell-off significantly impacted the broader market, leading the NGX All-Share Index to slip by 0.08%, closing at 105,451.06 points.
As expected, the market capitalization dipped by N48.58 billion in value, reducing the total capitalization to NGN 64.30 trillion.
A further analysis of the trading data indicated that all sectoral indices ended the day in the red with Insurance index worst hit and declining by 1.53%, followed by the Banking index which also dropped by 0.41%, and the Consumer Goods index dropped by 0.16%; the Oil and Gas index decilned by 0.08%, while the Industrial Goods index closed flat.
As earlier indicated, WEMABANK dominated both the volume and value charts, trading over 976.23 million units, which accounted for 65.79% of total market volume.
Overall, a significant portion of stocks on the NGX continued to trend downward, highlighting the need for caution by investors in market participation in the immediate term until strong fundamentals could reverse the bearish momentum in the local bourse.
