Nigerian Equity Markets | 13 Oct 2015: Nigerian Equities Market Retracts Uptrend… ASI Down 57bps

Lagos, Nigeria, Capital Markets in Africa — The Nigerian equities market retracted two consecutive days of gains as the composite index fell 57bps to close at 30,058.40 points after today’s trading session. In a similar manner, market capitalization lost N59.2bn to settle at N10.3tn. Today’s pullback was consequent on sell offs in DANGOTE CEMENT (-1.8%), NIGERIAN BREWERIES (-1.1%) and PZ (-3.9%). At end of trade, total volume and value of transactions traded declined 7.7% and 6.6% to settle at 124.2m units and N1.4bn respectively.

Analysis of sectoral returns shows a broadly positive performance today with the Oil & Gas index leading gains with 2.1% on the back of price appreciations in SEPLAT (+2.6%) and MOBIL (+1.0%). Equally, the Banking index improved 0.9% on gains in GUARANTY (-1.4%) and ETI (-0.8%) while the Insurance index also added 0.5%. On the flip side, against sell-offs in NIGERIAN BREWERIES (-1.1%) and GUINNESS (-1.3%), the Consumer Goods sector waned 0.5% while against losses recorded in DANGOTE CEMENT (-1.8%), the industrial sector shed 1bps.

Though positive, market breadth — advancers/decliners ratio — weakened at 1.0x; 23 gainers vs. 24 losers, OKOMUOIL (+5.0%), ETERNA (+5.0%) and BERGER (+4.6%) led the gainers while TRANS EXPRESS (-8.8%), UACN (-5.0%) and UBCAP (-5.0%) topped the losers’ chart. We expect the market to continue to trade sideways while anticipation of third quarter company results is expected to drive near term performance of the market.

Source: Afrinvest (West Africa) Limited Research Team