Heavy pressure witnessed

Pakistan Stock Exchange witnessed heavy pressure during the outgoing week ended on April 5, 2019 due to selling in various sectors. BRIndex100 lost 133.10 points on week-on-week basis to close at 3,940.79 points. Average daily volumes stood at 75.013 million shares. BRIndex30 decreased by 701.49 points to close at 20,162.92 points with average daily turnover of 56.805 million shares.
KSE-100 index declined by 1,127.53 points on week-on-week basis and closed at 37,521.81 points. Trading activities remained low as average daily volumes on ready counter decreased by 7.5 percent to 118.68 million shares as compared to previous week's average of 128.28 million shares. Average daily trading value declined by 20.0 percent to Rs 3.51 billion. The foreign investors remained net sellers of shares worth $3.6 million against an inflow of $0.5 million last week. Total market capitalization declined by Rs 178 billion to Rs 7.690 trillion.
An analyst at AKD Securities said fragmenting under wider macro constraints, brought home by a strong CPI read and 0.5bps hike in the MPS last week, the KSE-100 index dropped 2.9 percent on week-on-week basis to close at 37,522 points. Additional news flows of concern was a consistently pressured PkR, which slipped 0.2 percent on week-on-week basis against the US$, fueling concerns over continued inflationary headwinds to disposable in-comes and consumer demand.
Gainers over the week included POL (up 1.3 percent), OGDC (up 0.2 percent) and ABL (up 0.1 percent), whereas laggards were ASTL (down 15.8 percent), PSMC (down 14.9 percent) and HAS-COL (down 12.8 percent).
An analyst at JS Global Capital said almost all sectors contributed towards the decline, where heavy-weight sectors such as Commercial Banks (down 3.8 percent), Power (down 4.9 percent) and Oil & Marketing Companies (down 5.5 percent) underperformed the benchmark index. Furthermore, in spite of steady decline in international coal prices and news of increase in cement prices in the Northern region, the Cement sector declined by 2.2 percent (however outperformed by 0.7 percent).