The Nigerian stocks market continued its downward trend on Wednesday as sell pressures mount across almost every sector.
Market analysis revealed that sell pressure on the shares of CONOIL, UBA and DANGSUGAR did not lead to shedding 10 percent, 1.6 percent and 3.0 percent off their prices respectively but also drove the All-Share Index lower by 0.07 percent to 106,090.38 points.
Sequentially, the market capitalization dipped to close at N66.44 trillion while the Month-to-Date and Year-to-Date returns moderated to -1.6 percent and +3.1 percent, respectively.
The total volumes of trade skyrocketed by 361.77 percent to 1.50 billion units indicating a sharp increase in market activity.
Further analysis showed that total trade value rose by 29.57 percent cumulating at N10.26 billion, and exchanged in 11,748 deals.
The huge volume and value recorded in the day’s trading was driven by institutional investors who took up large transactions and block trades.
Meanwhile, SOVRENINS led in trading volume with was exchange of 989.73 million units, but suffered a share price lost of 5.66 percent, while MTNN dominated the value log with N2.69 billion in trades.
Sectoral performance recorded mixed results as the Oil & Gas, Consumer Goods and Insurance indices closed lower, shedding 0.6 percent, 0.2 percent and 0.2 percent respectively, while the Banking index advanced by 0.3 percent, even as the Industrial Goods index closed flat.
As measured by market breadth, market sentiment was negative (0.6x), as 31 tickers lost relative to 19 gainers. CONOIL (-10.0%) and BERGER (-9.8%) posted the most significant losses of the day, while TANTALIZER (+9.8%) and NSLTECH (+9.7%) led the gainers.
The overnight lending rate expanded by 8bps to 32.8 percent in the absence of any significant funding pressure on the system.
Proceedings in the NTB secondary market remained calm, albeit with a bullish undertone, as the average yield contracted slightly by 1bp to 19.0 percent.
Across the curve, the average yield contracted at the short (-1bp) and mid (-1bp) segments, driven by the demand for the 85DTM (-1bp) and 176DTM (-1bp) bills, respectively, but expanded at the long (+1bp) end due to the selloff of the 344DTM (+28bps) bill.
Similarly, the average yield declined by 2bps to 22.4% in the OMO segment.
Meanwhile, the Treasury bond secondary market traded on a bearish note, as the average yield expanded by 1bp to 18.2%.
Across the benchmark curve, the average yield expanded at the short (+1bp), mid (+1bp) and long (+2bps) segments due to sell pressures on the JUL-2030 (+3bps), FEB-2031 (+4bps) and JUN-2053 (+14bps) bonds, respectively.
