KARACHI: After a blistering rally that started last week, the stocks took a pause on Tuesday with the KSE-100 index slightly down by 11.14 points to settle at 30,402.09.
“It meant conceding just a pittance from the heavy gains of 1,094 points in the last six sessions,” said a senior broker shrugging off the slight pullback on Tuesday.
Bulls toss stocks to all-time high
While the local institutional investors decided to take profit on Tuesday, considering discretion to be better part of valour, the foreign fund managers continued to express ahead in picking up value scrips, making net purchases of $4.88m worth stocks, divided about equally in the banking and oil and gas sectors.
Dealers said that the market was off to a firm start also on Tuesday with the index adding 60 points, before moving down to close in the red.
Volumes decreased 24 per cent to 148 million shares with trading noticed mainly in second and third tier stocks.
Analysts pointed out that the banking sector, which had to bear the brunt after the announcement of SBP Monetary Policy Statement that left the policy rate unchanged at 10pc on Saturday struggled to find a footing on Tuesday.
AKBL again hit the ‘upper lock’ on the back of healthy earnings and a payout announced the day earlier.
BOP with the highest turnover for the day at 15.4m shares rose 4.1pc and UBL climbed 2.39pc. In heavyweight oil and gas sector, HASCOL, PPL and PSO added 0.34pc; 0.05pc and 1.48pc to their values.
Analyst Mujtaba Barakzai at JS Global observed that cement sector saw high volumes in DGKC, CHCC, KOHC and MLCF.
He believed that strong earnings outlook and potential M&A activity fuelled positive sentiments within the sector.
Published in Dawn, July 23rd , 2014
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