KARACHI: Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Friday witnessed a laclustre trading session by failing to cross the 44,000 points level and closed the week on a negative trend.
A day earlier, the stock market closed at 43,853.62 points and was set to regain the 44,000 points level. Instead, the benchmarked surged in early and reached its highest points of 43,966.27 points .
The bourse plunged soon and witnessed a rollercoaster ride and reached its lowest point of 43,653.33 points. The bourse eventually closed after losing 200.29 points (-0.46%) at 43,653.33 points. The total volume of shares was 61.845 million valued at Rs4.178 billion.
The lower bench KSE-30 index dropped by 100.43 points (-0.59%) and closed at 16,976.08 points. The total volume of shares was 39.871 million. The KMI 30 index closed at 70,645.01 points after declining by 505.55 points (-0.71%) while the All Share Index gained 136.66 (-0.45%) and closed at 29,972.80 points. The total volume of share traded were 149.256 million at the stock market.
The highest number of shares traded belonged to TPL Properties (TPLP -5.31%) which traded 12.272 million shares. This was followed by Pak Elektron (PAELR3 -26.91%), TPL Corp Ltd (TPL 0.30%) and Unity Food Ltd (UNITY -4.32%). The number of scrips traded were 11.907 million, 9.395 million, and 9.041 million, respectively.
A mix of geopolitical and local reasons are responsible for the subdued reaction to the stock market. Global pil prices rose on Friday on continued concerns about supply disruptions for Russian oil and oil products.
The domestic Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) based weekly inflation for the week ending March 10, for the combined consumption group, increased for the fourth straight week by 0.52% as compared to the previous week.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Rupee (PKR) managed to gain 12 paisa in the interbank session on the last trading day of the week and closed at Rs 178.51 against the US dollar, mainly due to the strong performance of workers’ remittances in the month of February.
