Nigeria Equity Watch | 7 July 2015 : NSE Maintains Losing Streak to Fifth Day… ASI down 21bps

Lagos, Nigeria (Capital Markets in Africa) — The sell pressure on the Nigerian bourse continued as the All Share Index (ASI) dipped 0.2% to close at 32,380.26pts. This drove 1-Week performance and YTD return to -3.2% and -6.6% respectively. Following the trend, investors lost N21.8bn at the close of trade, bringing market capitalization to N11.1tn.

Today’s decline was broadly driven by further depreciation in Banking and Consumer Goods bellwethers – UBA (-6.2%) and NIGERIAN BREWERIES (-2.1%) respectively. Conversely, market activities were up as volume and value traded advanced 39.6% to 217.1m units and 79.9% to N3.0bn respectively.

Sectorial baskets on the Nigerian bourse still remained largely negative today. The Consumer Goods index led the sector losers with a decline of 1.4% due to declines in NIGERIAN BREWERIES (-2.1%) and UNILEVER (-3.5%). Activities in the Banking, Oil & Gas and Industrial Goods sectors also reported negative returns of 0.7%, 0.3% and 0.1% accordingly. However, the Insurance sector added 0.5% to its index on the account of increase in CONTINSURE (+4.2%).

Sentiments in equities further weakened today as market breadth closed at 0.7x as 18 stocks advanced relative to 25 decliners. NEIMETH (+9.7%), STANBIC (+4.9%) and VONO (+4.8%) led the market gainers’ chart while UBA (-6.1%), EVANSMED (-5.0%) and BERGER (-5.0%) topped the losers’ chart. While negative market performance has been driven by blurred policy signals and events in the Political scenery, we advise investors to maintain a medium to long term horizon in equities by taking advantage of the current cheap valuations in value stocks.

Source: Afrinvest (West Africa) Limited Research Team