Sell pressure on Access Bank, Dangote Sugar, FBNH and 12 others caused the Nigerian equity market to halt its two consecutive trading days’ gains on Thursday.
The bourse declined marginally 0.01 per cent, having shed 1.51 absolute points to close at 24,276.56 points, while Market Capitalization lost N0.79 billion, representing a 0.01 per cent dip to close at N12.66 trillion as the market year to date performance worsened to -9.6 per cent.
Law Union gained 7 per cent to emerge as the top gainer of the 10 advancers, while Conoil emerged as the top loser of 14 others, having lost 10 per cent.
The volume and value of equities traded declined by 17.4 per cent and 47.4 per cent to 192.1 million units and ₦2.5 billion respectively.
Fidelity Bank (38.1m units), GTBank (23.6m units) and Zenith Bank (23.1m units) were the most active stocks by volume, while GTBank (₦534.5m), Zenith Bank (₦384.5m) and MTNN (₦374.5m) led by value.
The Insurance and Banking indices were the best performers as both gained 0.6 per cent each following price appreciation in AIICO (+3.3 per cent), GTBank (+1.1 per cent) and Zenith Bank (+0.6 per cent). The Industrial Goods sector advanced 0.2 per cent, buoyed by 0.1 per cent gain by Bua Cement.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Goods and Oil & Gas indices lost 0.6 per cent and 0.4 per cent respectively due to sell-pressures in International Breweries (-8.9 per cent), Dangote Sugar (-0.9 per cent) and Conoil (-10.0 per cent).
However, the AFR-ICT remained unchanged.
