KARACHI: Trading on the stock exchange stayed range-bound on Friday amid low volumes owing to investors’ concerns about the upcoming budget and inflationary pressure.

Arif Habib Ltd said the pharmaceutical and IT sectors remained in the limelight because of the expectations about incentives in the budget. Value buying took place in the last trading hour, which led the index to close in the green zone.

JS Global said the market is expected to remain range-bound going forward and asked investors to be cautious while taking advantage of the current upside as selling opportunity.

The KSE-100 index settled at 42,014.73 points, up 278.77 points or 0.67 per cent from a day ago.

The trading volume decreased 50.4pc to 115.9 million shares while the traded value went down 43.9pc to $15.2m on a day-on-day basis.

Stocks contributing significantly to the traded volume included TPL Properties Ltd (12m shares), G3 Technologies Ltd (10.43m shares), Lotte Chemical Ltd (7.33m shares), Hum Network Ltd (6.58m shares) and Hascol Petroleum Ltd (4.2m shares).

Sectors that contributed the highest number of points to the benchmark index included oil and gas exploration (64.36 points), fertiliser (57.11 points), automobile assembling (41 points), technology and communications (29.16 points) and chemical (26.96 points).

Shares contributing most positively to the index included Millat Tractors Ltd (31.53 points), Oil and Gas Development Company Ltd (26.45 points), Pakistan Petroleum Ltd (23 points), Systems Ltd (22.92 points) and Engro Corporation Ltd (20.25 points).

Stocks that contributed most negatively to the index included Bank AL Habib Ltd (16.9 points), Thal Ltd (10 points), National Bank of Pakistan Ltd (8.06 points), Meezan Bank Ltd (6.65 points) and Service Industries Ltd (5.62 points).

Foreign investors were net sellers as they offloaded shares worth $0.7m.

Published in Dawn,June 11th, 2022