Karachi: Bulls took a breather on Thursday, following a relentless charge in the past three days when they tossed the KSE-100 index up by an incredible 2,133 points.

Profit-taking took hold when the index sank 142 points, but recovered quickly as investors went into cherry picking the small-cap stocks that would be the part of the MSCI Emerging Market Index.

The KSE index surged 251 points intraday, but closed almost flat with marginal decline of 7.45 points at 52,869 points.

Topline Securities stated that the investors flocked to small cap stocks as THAL, PAEL, ISL, and SNGP closed up 5pc, 4.9pc, 4.8pc, and 3.4pc, respectively, with cumulatively contribution of 107.4 points to the index.

Amongst sectors, banks’ scrapped 169 points off the index as investors decided to book profit. BAFL, NBP, UBL and MCB were down 3.5pc, 3pc, 2.4pc and 2.2pc, respectively.

Intermarket Securities pointed out that the mainboard items for inclusion in the MSCI Emerging Market Index, which had been on the run up for several days, saw investors taking profits in OGDC down by 1.61pc, HBL 0.44pc, MCB 2.22pc, UBL 2.37pc and LUCK 0.20pc.

ENGRO rising 1.02pc was the only exception among the MSCI EM Index names that managed to close in green.

The volume was down 33pc to 408 million from 607m shares a day earlier.

The traded value rosed 3pc to Rs24.4 billion from Rs23.7bn.

Foreign sell-off was in the significant sum of $11.71m, but it was completely absorbed by mutual funds, which bought stocks of the net value of $18.99m.

“Stocks closed flat amid late session pressure in oil, banking, auto stocks and on pre budget uncertainty” said Ahsan Mehanti of Arif Habib Corp.

Slump in global crude prices and concerns for falling foreign exchange reserves on external payments played a catalyst role in bearish close in the futures contracts rollover session at PSX.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2017