Trading in Nigeria’s equities market rebounded from its recent downward trend on Monday, spurred by notable buying interest in key stocks such as SEPLAT (+9.99%), UBA (+4.33%), OANDO (+3.77%), and NESTLE (+1.72%) amongst others.
With the demand for major blue chip stocks during the trading session, the NGX All Share Index (NGXASI) appreciated by 0.64%, closing at 98,081.38 points, while market capitalization increased by NGN378.5 billion to settle at NGN59.8 trillion.
Available data from the local bourse’s supervisory authority, the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) showed that today’s ASI represented the highest over the past week with the moving average of 98,214.38, indicating near-term bullish momentum and sustained short-term buying pressure.
Similarly, the index’s position above the 20-day moving average reinforces the equities market’s positive medium-term outlook, highlighting steady gains in recent weeks.
However, analysts at Bancorp Securities Limited noted that the index remained below the 50-day moving average, which signals resilience in the longer-term trend, suggesting upward momentum with potential for continued growth.
According to the NGX data, the market breadth ratio of 1.82x with 31 advancers to 17 decliners shows that there were significantly more advancing stocks compared to decliners.
Again, the UD ratio of 7.30 showcases the strength of buying pressure in today’s session. Although UBA accounted for an excess of 34.11% of total volume traded, this ratio, which measures the relative strength of advancing stocks versus declining ones in terms of volume, showed that the magnitude of gains for advancing stocks far outweighed the losses for declining stocks.
The analysts projected that the positive sentiment seen today could signal that institutional investors are positioning themselves for tail-end capital gains, as we culminate the fiscal year 2024.
They further maintained that with the NGXASI surpassing all key moving averages, both retail and institutional buyers appeared to be comfortable pushing the market higher, cautioning, however, that this optimism should be tempered with some caution as the index approaches the psychological resistance of 100,000 points, a level that could potentially invite profit-taking or a pullback.
On sectoral performance during the day’s trading, the NGX data showed that the Industrial Goods Index was declined, edging down by 0.04%, primarily due to a 0.82% drop in WAPCO’s share price.
In contrast, the Oil and Gas Index emerged as the top performer, rising by 4.10%, driven by strong buying interest in SEPLAT, OANDO, and ETERNA even as the Insurance Index gained 1.07%, followed by the Banking Index with a 0.96% increase, and the Consumer Goods Index, which rose by 0.23%.
A further analysis of the data reflected that the Trading Metrics were positive as total volume of stocks traded increased by 12.89% with 405 million units traded while the total value appreciated by 130.46% settled at NGN27.5 billion.
The figures also indicated that UBA topped the volume traded for the day accounting for 34.11% of the total volume traded while SEPLAT topped the value traded accounting for 66.57% of the total N18.3 billion value traded during the day’s trading.
