KARACHI: Pakistan Stock Exchange remained under pressure during the outgoing week ended on June 19, 2020 due to selling by both local and foreign investors.

BRIndex100 lost 141.73 points on week-on-week basis to close at 3,428.04 points. Average daily volumes stood at 178.782 million shares.

BRIndex30 declined by 761.66 points to close at 17315.24 points with average daily turnover of 96.526 million shares.

KSE-100 Index plunged by 1,172.28 points on week-on-week basis and closed at 33,438.95 points. Average daily trading volumes on ready counter slightly improved by 1.4 percent and stood at 228.75 million shares as compared to previous week's average of 225.57 million shares. Average daily trading value however decreased by 14.9 percent to Rs 6.94 billion.

The foreign investors remained net sellers of shares with net sell standing at $4.78 million during this week, taking calendar-year-to-date net sell to $274.9 million. Total market capitalization declined by Rs 172 billion or 2.6 percent to Rs 6.373 trillion.

An analyst at AKD Securities said that the KSE-100 remained under pressure during the week where a disappointing budget, providing incentives only to a few sectors against investor expectations of broad-based relaxations, resulted in index receiving a battering on first trading session of the week.

Even the sectors which were incentivized in the budget didn't receive a good response as cement and engineering sector witnessed a decline of 5.5 percent on each. As soon as the index recovered from early onslaught, political uncertainty took a toll after a member party of ruling coalition announced to part ways. Resultantly, KSE-100 Index closed the week at 33,439 points, down 3.39 percent on week-on-week basis.

Major gainers from KSE-100 were HMM (up 12.7 percent), JLICL (up 11.1 percent), IDYM (up 9.1 percent) and PTC (up 4.1 percent), whereas laggards dragging the index lower were IGIHL (down 17.6 percent), GATM (down 13.3 percent), FFBL (down 11.2 percent) and SHEL (down 9.7 percent).

An analyst at JS Global Capital said that the KSE-100 Index witnessed 3.4 percent correction, closing at 33,439 levels this week. While the Federal Budget FY21 announced last week brought no joy to market participants, sentiments were further dampened by political noise as BNP-M quit the PTI-led coalition government.

Amid chaos over supply of petroleum products and initiation of the government inquiry on the matter, the Oil and Gas Marketing Companies (OMCs) remained under pressure this week. Other sectors that contributed to this week's correction were Banks (down 3.3 percent), Steel (Engineering: down 5.5 percent) and Fertilizers (down 4.7 percent).

On the other hand, excitement over potential Covid-19 related drugs kept the pharmaceutical sector upbeat as it gained 0.05 percent this week.