The Ghana Stock Exchange year-to-date return continued its jittery start to the new year 2022 as it sank deeper, trading below the signal line of momentum indicator.

Wednesday’s session saw the GSE year-to-date declined by 7.92 points, suggesting a bearish bias on the counter. This negative sentiment is largely as a result of a two-day corrective decline of Fan Milk PLC which suffered another heavy loss on the day.

According to the market report, the market indexes also continue to remain in the woods after Wednesday’s pullback in the year-to-date returns.

Regarding the performance of GSE market indices, fag-end buying propelled benchmark indices from the day’s low, but it still closed below the red line. The benchmark GSE Composite Index (GSE-CI) pared 3.88 points, representing a decline of 0.14 percent to close at 2,781.42 points. The decline led to a 1-week loss of 0.29 percent, a month on month loss of 0.97 percent, and an overall year-to-date loss of 0.28 percent.

However, the GSE Financial Stocks Index (GSE-FSI) which measure the financial sector stocks and insurance, maintained its value at 2,154.03 points, making it a month on month gain of 0.87 percent, and a year-to-date gain of 0.1 percent.

Fan Milk PLC Lose Again

Fan Milk Limited’s (FML) losing streak entered the second day as investors enter into panic mode.

According to the trading chart, six GSE equities participated in trading, ending with one loser, namely Fan Milk PLC, with 9.8 percent share price depreciation. However, the rest of the stocks traded flat as they closed the same way they opened.

FML closed its trading day (Wednesday, January 26, 2022) at GHS3.22 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording a GHS0.35 drop from its previous closing price of GHS3.57. similarly, it lost GHS0.38 in Tuesday’s outing, representing 9.62 percent decline.

However, Fan Milk began the year 2022 with a share price of GHS4.00 but has since lost 19.5 percent off that price valuation within the first month into the year, ranking it fifth on the GSE in terms of year-to-date performance.

Boost in Trading Activity

Trading activity swelled considerably more than 1000 percent at the end of trading session. At the end of Wednesday’s trading session on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), a total of 3,283,919 shares, corresponding to a market value of GHS 3,705,186.45, were traded. Comparatively, at the end of Tuesday’s trading session on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), a total of 124,661 shares, corresponding to a market value of GHS 245,319.99, were traded.

MTN Ghana recorded the highest volume of 3.27 million traded shares, followed by Fan Milk (10,000), Ecobank Ghana (1,949) and GCB Bank (1,575).

equity market — Rising volume of shares traded

On the flip side, the current market capitalization of the Ghana Stock Exchange also plummeted from GHS 64 billion to settle at GHS 63.9 billion.

All in all, experts suggested that even if the technical pullback continues, it would be prudent to stay away from creating any aggressive positions until some stability in the markets is seen.