KARACHI: The bulls ended a three-day losing streak on Thursday following a rating upgrade that improved the economic outlook, leading to cherry-picking and lifting the benchmark index above 78,000.

Ahsan Mehanti of Arif Habib Corporation said stocks closed bullish on Moody’s Ratings’ upgrade to Caa2, raising the outlook to positive on reduced default risk.

He added that falling bond yields and greater certainty on Pakistan’s external source financing ahead of the IMF board approving $7bn played a catalyst in the bullish close.

Topline Securities Ltd said the rally was fuelled by significant gains in heavyweights such as Millat Tractors Ltd, Engro Corporation, National Bank of Pakistan, Colgate Palmolive and Hub Power, contributing 427 points to the index.

As a result, the KSE-100 index hit an intraday high of 78,513.86 and a low of 78,017.36. However, it settled at 78,349.66 after adding 356.88 points or 0.46pc day-on-day.

The trading volume was down 5.69pc to 599.82 million shares. The traded value, however, surged 25.45pc to Rs20.40bn day-on-day.

Stocks contributing significantly to the traded volume included Sym­metry Group (64.29m shares), National Bank of Pakistan (42.59m shares), Kohinoor Spinning Mills Ltd (41.14m shares), Secure Logistics (21.48m shares) and Air Link Comm (21.23m shares).

The shares registering the most significant increases in their prices in absolute terms were Unilever Foods (Rs241.02), Colgate Palm­olive (Rs87.97), Nestle Pakistan (Rs77.84), Pak Engin­eering (Rs70.18) and Millat Tractors (Rs49.45).

The companies registering significant decreases in their share prices in absolute terms were Al-Ab­bas Sugar (Rs29.22), Mari Pet­role­um (Rs21.56), Pak Tob­a­cco (Rs19.58), Bata Pak­istan (Rs16.30) and Cha­k­wal Spinning (Rs5.35).

Foreign investors rem­ained net buyers as they purchased shares worth $0.44m.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2024