By Chioma Obinagwam
The New year appears to be smiling on the equities listed on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX), having sustained an upward (bullish) trend in two consecutive weeks since the year 2022 unveiled.
Confiance News gathered that the bulls will continue its dominance in the equities market in the current week.
The reasons are not far fetched; analysts attribute it to the scramble for stocks with attractive dividend yields.
“In the short term, we expect the bulls to retain dominance in the market given positioning for 2021FY dividends as institutional investors continue to search for clues on the direction of yields in the FI market,” Analysts at Cordros Research, a leading financial services group in the country, opined.
A dividend yield, according to Investopedia, is a financial ratio that tells you the percentage of a company’s share price that it pays out in dividends each year.
On the other hand, analysts at Afrinvest, a financial advisory firm focused on West Africa, are quite undecided on the bullish stance of the market in the week under review.
According to them, the NGX with respect to equities, will assume a mixed posture.
They said,”we expect market performance to be a mix of profit-taking and bargain hunting activities.”
Confiance News recalls that NGX All-Share index rose 2.7 percent in the first week of the year to 43,854.42 basis points (bps), while market capitalisation gained ₦1.3 trillion to ₦23.6 trillion within the same period.
More so, the bullish trend was sustained in the previous week (second week of the year) as the NGX All-Share index inched up by 1.4 bps to settle at 44,454.67 points, even as market capitalisation closed N24 trillion better.
Already, the trading on Monday opened on a negative note (bearish) with the NGX All-Share index shedding 0.12 percent to close at 44,399.66 points while Market Capitalisation followed the same pattern shaving ₦29.6 billion to settle at ₦23.95 trillion from the ₦23.95 trillion.
Moreover, 14 stocks posted gains whereas 21 stocks declined.
Confiance News notes that the downward trend recorded from Monday’s trading is not enough to determine the position of equities in the current week; since, there are still four more trading days to go and that could shift the pendulum in the bulls direction.
However, year-to-date (ytd) performance of the NGX All-Share index remains on the positive territory at 3.9 percent.
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