Market Last Week (Our Observations)
- Last week, the local bourse closed in the red, beating our positive performance expectation as earnings and dividend announcements failed to buoy sentiment. Consequently, the benchmark index fell on 3 out of 5 trading sessions to settle at 47,268.61 points (down 0.1% w/w). Similarly, YTD return weakened to 10.7%, while market capitalisation declined N32.2bn w/w to N25.5tn.
- Performance of the sectors within our purview was depressed with only 2 of the 6 indices closing positive last week. The Banking and Consumer Goods indices lost the most, down 2.7% and 1.7% w/w respectively. Trailing, the Industrial Goods and Insurance indices dipped 0.7% and 0.2% w/w respectively. Meanwhile, the Oil & Gas and AFR-ICT indices sustained the previous week’s gain, up 10.6% and 0.2% w/w respectively.
- The top performing stocks for last week were SEPLAT (+20.2%), LINKASSURE (+16.0%), and FCMB (+11.8%) while RTBRISCO (-33.0%), LEARNAFR (-24.1%), and NGXGROUP (-18.4%) were the top underperforming stocks.
Market This Week (Our Expectations)
- The Afrinvest weekly sentiment indicator weakened to 1.8x from 3.0x in the prior week.
- In the absence of positive catalysts to lift performance in the market, we expect the weak performance to persist this week.
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