KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange reacted to growing political and economic uncertainty in the country witnessing intense selling pressure with the benchmark KSE-100 index lost 978 points on Tuesday.
The KSE-100 index opened Tuesday at 41,367.11 on Tuesday morning and the index saw muted activity with index advancing from around 184.42 points to a high of 41,551.53 points.
Investors reacted with panic to the depreciating Pakistani rupee against the US dollar and the uncertainty that surrounded the country’s political arena after the Punjab by-elections.
After around 10:30 am, when news of downgraded ratings from two of the world’s biggest credit rating agencies – Moody’s (BBB-) and Fitch (B-), started pouring in, the index started to go into a decline.
By noon, the index was down around 209.67 points to 41,157.44 points. But in the next hour, the index had dropped 373.65 points to the level of 40,788.02 points.
From there until 3:08 pm, the index lost only 81.63 points to climb down to the level of 40,708.85 points. Thereafter, the graph showed a near sheer drop of 492.47 points to a level of 40,216.38 points
Before the end of the day, however, the index made a slight recovery to close at 40,389.07 points. But by then, it had cumulatively lost around 1,150.73 points.
The stocks of a total of 399 companies were traded during the day, out of which 46 were in the green, 285 red, and 8 remained unchanged.
Overall trading volumes rose to 194.86 million shares compared with Monday’s tally of 151.35 million. The value of shares traded during the day was Rs5.78 billion.
Karachi-Electric was the volume leader with 19.6 million shares traded, closing at Rs3.02 as the price fell by Rs0.03. It was followed by Worldcall Telecom Limited with 17.6 million shares traded, losing Rs0.11 to close at Rs1.25 and Cnergyico PK Limited with 9.96 million shares traded, losing Rs0.16 to close at Rs5.02.
The sectors which contributed most to driving the index lower were the banking sector, which was down 236.12 points. It was followed by the oil and gas exploration sector which was down by 139.97 points. The fertilizer sector was down 131.05 points.
