Stock Buyers Cautious On FX Concerns, Lose N126bn

Investors at the Nigerian stock market continued to tread cautiously by taking further sell positions on Tuesday as weaker naira pains.

The sell-side pressure seen at the Nigerian stock market fuelled the record decrease by 0.34 per cent or N126 billion. Ahead of the Nigerian senate screening of Olayemi Cardoso, the new Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), data from AbokiFX, an online platform that tracks the exchange rate on the parallel market showed that one dollar traded at N1,000.

Stock investors remain cautious over the nation’s macro-economic outlook especially foreign exchange (FX), as this directly impacts foreign investments in the market, said Lagos-based Vetiva research analysts.

“With half-year (H1) 2023 results now out of the way, we expect to see a slightly bearish undertone in the banking sector, as profit taking activities persist, while general market sentiments remain mixed,” Vetiva analysts had noted on Monday.

This week, the stock market has dropped by one per cent, while its return year-to-date (YtD) lowered to +30.05 per cent on Tuesday.

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Stocks like Conoil, Oando, Berger Paints were on offer. Conoil dropped most from day-open high of N89.10 to N80.20, losing N8.90 or 9.99percent. Oando was also down, from a high of N10.70 to N9.65, losing N1.05 or 9.81 per cent.

Berger Paints went down from N12.75 to N11.65, losing N1.10 or 8.63 per cent. FTN Cocoa made the league of top laggards after dropping from N1.91 to N1.72, losing 19 kobo or 9.95 per cent, while the share price of Lasaco, another major laggard dropped from N2.02 to N1.85, shedding 17 kobo or 8.42 per cent.

The Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) All-Share Index (ASI) and equities market capitalisation decreased further on Tuesday from preceding day’s 66,882.64 points and N36.605 trillion respectively to 66,652.17 points and N36.479 trillion.

At the close of trading, the stock investors in 7,018 deals exchanged 363,989,562 shares valued at N4.529 billion.

The market has since last week gotten some level of bearish sentiments as the NGX All-Share Index closed lower by 0.11percent to settle at 67,324.59 points.

“As we advised last week, we rebalanced our portfolio in line with our weighting strategy, mirroring the changes in the NGX-ASI weight constituents… In addition, we also adjusted the weighting strategy for our notional positions in some tickers, given our perception of the market. This adjustment implied selling off some units (considering market liquidity) using the respective close prices on Monday September 18, 2023,” according to CardinalStone research analysts in their Model Equity Portfolio released on September 25.

“We are now neutral in our overall bank exposure but will make further adjustments this week to bring our weights in line with the sub-index of banks, as much as possible, and bring our overall position to a small underweight,” said Coronation research analysts in their Model Equity Portfolio released on September 25.

They noted that last week that made notional purchases of Seplat Energy as part of their effort to create a double overweight in the stock, prompted to do this by recent gains in oil prices.

“Liquidity was insufficient to get the job done (we respect actual market liquidity even though this is a notional portfolio) and so we will continue to make such notional purchases this week. We plan no other changes this week,” the analysts added.