Negative sentiments take over equities trading as the benchmark index closes trade bearish on Tuesday to reverse gains of the previous day.
Notably, the sentiment was negative at the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), as investors dumped part of their holdings in medium and heavyweight stocks such as Nestle Nigeria, WAPCO, Zenith Bank, Oando and Flour mills of Nigeria, hence, their respective share prices declined by 6.90 per cent, 7.08 per cent, 0.58 per cent, 4.69 per cent and 6.41 per cent respectively.
Consequently, the benchmark index declined by 0.6 per cent to 39,697.62 basis points. Accordingly, the Month-to-Date and Year-to-Date losses increased to -0.3 per cent and -1.4 per cent, respectively.
Also, the market’s worth depreciated as investors lost N122.53 billion, leaving the market capitalisation at N20.77 trillion.
As measured by market breadth, market sentiment remained negative, as 24 tickers declined, relative to 17 gainers.
On the performance chart, Mutual Benefits and Ardova Plc topped the losers’ list with respective ten per cent decline in share value, while Academy Press and PZ recorded the largest gains of the day having appreciated by 9.8 per cent and 9.4 per cent respectively.
Similarly, losses were broad-based across sub-sector gauges tracked as all the sub-indices tracked closed in the red zone except for the NSE Insurance index which rose by 0.21 per cent.
The NSE Banking, NSE Consumer Goods, NSE Oil/Gas and NSE Industrial indices fell by 0.12 per cent, 3.86 per cent, 0.88 per cent and 0.41 per cent respectively.
Meanwhile, trading activity was mixed as total deals and volume of stocks traded dipped by 4.34 per cent and 59.08 per cent to 4,470 deals and 0.22 billion units respectively; however, the value of stocks traded ballooned by 185.47 per cent to N5.3 billion.
Zenith Bank was the most traded stock by volume at 48.10 million units, while Nestle Nigeria was the most traded stock by value at N2.73 billion.
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