KARACHI: Bulls took command of the stock market on Friday, tossing the KSE-100 index up by 573 points, or 1.23 per cent, to close at 47,198.

The 47,000 barrier was easily knocked down as investors fell over each other for fresh buying all over the board.

Market capitalisation jumped by Rs85 billion over the day to Rs8.3 trillion. The significant feature of the day’s trading was the highest deployment of funds in equities amounting to $6.85m by individuals, followed by ‘brokers proprietary trading’ purchases of $1.35 million. Foreign investors selling stood the same as on Thursday at $5.91m. Banks, mutual funds, corporates and insurance companies avoided the bandwagon.

Not easily excitable, institutional investors perhaps decided to err on the side of caution even at the cost of missing out on a strong rally.

Among scrips, MEBL, TRG, LUCK, Systems and PSEL were the strongest performers that cumulatively contributed 345 points to the index. Traded volume stood at 427m shares on Friday with ANL leading the volumes table.

The slight damage done by the MSCI’s downgrade of Pakistan Index to Frontier Market (FM) from Emerging Market (EM) was fully absorbed. Investors also pushed aside the worrisome thought of heavy depreciation of the rupee against the dollar, high trade deficit and the uneasy situation of Covid-19 cases in the country.

Some reports indicated that the Federal Board of Revenue chairman had presented a summary to strengthen Inland Revenue Enforcement Network (IREN) and combat tax evasion and leakages of duties payable on specified goods through enforcement of Track & Trace System.

Sector-wise, technology shares were a rage as Systems Limited, TRG, Avanceon, Netsol flew to new highs. Refineries gained over news of the Refinery Policy 2021 being close to finalisation. Cement dispatches for the month of August showed some improvement compared to last month’s numbers, while dispatch growth on a year-on-year basis showed an increase of 23pc. It finally managed to garner investor interest in the undervalued cement scrips with D G Khan, Lucky, Fauji, Cherat, Javedan and Maple Leaf making good gains.

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2021