KARACHI, March 14: KSE Chairman Yasin Lakhani said on Monday that the local investors and overseas Pakistanis were the major players in the recent surge in the stock market.

Commenting on the record breaking performance of the market, he said that a large chunk of savings from the fixed income instruments have also been migrated towards stock market due to high return.

KSE 100-Index on Monday recorded an all-time high gain in a single day as the index crossed the 10,000-point barrier on hectic buying.

“Billions of rupees have been shifted from fixed income instruments where the return is negligible to stock market in the recent days. This is a saving of pensioners, retired employees and senior citizens”, he added.

Mr Lakhani said that the market was rising due to high return in the equities and on the higher expectations of government’s privatization plans.

“This is a privatization-driven surge as people are confident that this process will continue and more public sector organizations will be offered to them in the days ahead”, he observed.

Chairman KSE said that this surge was not artificial and the players were active in the selected scrips where dividends and returns were high.

Answering a question, he said that better risk management had increased the confidence of investors and not a single incident of default had so far been reported after 2001.

“The circuit breaker mechanism has prevented defaults and market is working smoothly despite such a giant stride”, Lakhani noted.

He said that people were of the opinion that the market was rather “over regulated” as far as the exposures limits were concerned.—APP