KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) succumbed to selling pressure on Thursday, with the benchmark KSE-100 Index, despite recovering losses accumulated in early trade, shedding over 400 points by day’s end.
Foreign investors offloaded equities for the fifth consecutive session on Wednesday, registering a net outflow of $3.13 million.
“Regardless of what the international crude prices are being trading at, local exploration & production and oil & gas management companies, which responded positively to the ascend in international crude prices last week, remained oblivious to further price gains,” analyst at Arif Habib Ltd stated. “Profit booking is clearly on investors’ minds, who have so far been cashing out from fertiliser, cement, E&P and O&GMCs.”
Banks, on the other hand, that have weathered the outflow from foreign investors (possibly due to MSCI rebalancing), showed initial signs of recovery on the prospect of expectation of status quo in the upcoming monetary policy.
“This is reflected by the yield change in secondary market for 10-year PIBs, which marked a low of 7.64pc on April 17, 2020, and have since recovered to 8.23pc today, indicating that there may be a status quo on policy rate.”
Losing 489.30 points in the late hours, the KSE-100 Index marked its intraday low at 33,238.88. It settled lower by 424.02 points at 33,034.16.
Among other indices, the KMI-30 Index plunged 1,006.98 points to end at 54,061.39, while the KSE All Share Index dropped 292.73 points, closing at 23,650.99. The advancers to decliners’ ratio stood at 74 to 209.
The overall market volumes plunged from 208.88 million in the last session to 175.99 million shares, with Hascol Petroleum Limited (HASCOL -4.85pc), Maple Leaf Cement Factory Limited (MLCF -2.05pc) and DG Khan Cement Company Limited (DGKC -2.59pc) leading the volume chart. The scrips had exchanged 16.09 million, 12.56 million and 8.19 million shares, respectively.
Sectors that contributed towards the benchmark index’s losses included oil & gas exploration (-121.80 points), cement (-53.84 points) and power generation & distribution (-51.90 points). Among the companies, Oil and Gas Development Company (OGDC -48.62 points), Pak Petroleum Ltd (PPL -46.08 points) and Hub Power Company (HUBC -42.79 points) dented the index the most.
The cement sector lost 1.57pc from its cumulative market capitalization, with Lucky Cement (LUCK -2.55pc), DG Khan Cement (DGKC -2.59pc), Maple Leaf Cement (MLCF -2.05pc) and Cherat Cement (CHCC -1.66pc) closing in the red.
