KARACHI: Stocks continued to be trampled over for the third day in a row. The KSE-100 index suffered another mighty blow as it lost 644.23 points (1.50pc) and closed at 42,358.61 on Thursday.
The benchmark index has seen erosion of 1,322 points in the last three sessions.
Moody’s was to blame for the Thursday’s commotion in the market as the credit rating agency downgraded Pakistan’s outlook to ‘negative’ from ‘stable’ driven by country’s heightened external vulnerability risk amid falling foreign exchange reserves.
Market continued to drift lower throughout the day, the index marking an intraday low by 707 points. The benchmark’s slide was fuelled by the incessant foreign selling, which in the current month stood at $40m.
According to figures released by the National Clearing Company Ltd, foreign funds pulled out massive sum of $10.9m on Thursday. Belying the fear of local institutional sell-off, banks, companies and insurance companies were net buyers while mutual funds stayed on the sidelines. Only the individuals, acted like the panic-prone herd and offloaded stocks worth $6.8m.
Arif Habib Ltd pointed out: “An interesting phenomenon observed today and is perhaps carrying for the past two sessions is the growing number of repo transactions, which increase the volume but do not affect the rates significantly. Apparently, the amnesty scheme is causing the portfolio bearers to adjust positions before end June”.
The heavyweight sectors continued to lead the laggards with banks contributing 224 points; oil exploration 84 points; cement 56 points; fertiliser 45 points and auto sector 40 points to the index decline.
HBL was down 3.1pc, UBL 3.6pc, PPL 1.8pc, PAKT 5pc, BAHL 0.5pc, PSO 2pc, POL 1.4pc, HMB 5pc, OGDC 0.8pc and Hub Power 1.4pc, which together wiped off 338 from the index.
Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2018
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