The bears held sway on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 as a sudden wave of profit-taking gripped the market, while the index lost ground rapidly.
As investors continued their selling spree, offloading shares, some major stocks were caught up in the web. Meanwhile, Wednesday’s decline was the biggest collapse of the market since the full implementation of the electronic levy.
In the aggregate, 12 GSE listed equities participated in trading, ending with disappointingly three losers. Total Petroleum Ghana lost the most value on the day with 10 per cent share price depreciation.
TOTAL closed its trading day (Wednesday, May 11, 2022) at GHS4.05 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording a 45 pesewas drop from its previous closing price of GH¢4.50. Total Petroleum began the year with a share price of GH¢5.02 but has since lost 19.3 percent off that price valuation, ranking it 33rd on the GSE in terms of year-to-date performance.
MTN Stocks Went on Its Knees
It was a torrid time for MTN investors as their frail faith of MTN stocks defying the e-levy odds all came crushing. The telecommunication giant failed to hold on to its flat run by depreciating 8 per cent on the day. Meanwhile, this was the first defeat suffered by MTN Ghana since the introduction of the e-levy. Just as predicted by many analyst, MTN share price declined and fell below the GH¢1 mark.
MTNGH closed its trading day (Wednesday, May 11, 2022) at GH¢0.92 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording 8 pesewas drop from its previous closing price of GHS1.00. MTN began the year with a share price of GH¢1.11 but has since lost 17.1 per cent off that price valuation, ranking it 32nd on the GSE in terms of year-to-date performance. Shareholders’ worries are compounded by the fact that E-levy has whipped up bearish sentiments among investors of MTN Ghana.
Another loser on the day was Cal Bank. Cal Bank depreciated more than 3 per cent on the day. Cal Bank closed its trading day at GHS0.87 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording a 3.3 percent drop from its previous closing price of GHS0.90.
Cal Bank is the third most traded stock on the Ghana Stock Exchange over the past three months (Feb 7 – May 11, 2022). It has traded a total volume of 6.86 million shares valued at GHS 5.86 million over the period, with an average of 108,942 traded shares per session. A volume high of 1.77 million was achieved on March 4 for the same period.
Situation Across Sectoral Fronts
It was a bearish situation across the sectoral fronts as all sectoral indices closed in the same direction with the all-share index.
The benchmark GSE Composite Index (GSE-CI) plummeted by 100.57 points- the biggest loss so far this year, to close at 2,585.13 points. This represents a decline of 3.74 per cent. Unfortunately, this led to a week on week loss of 3.94 per cent, a month on month loss of 4 percent, and an overall year-to-date loss of 7.32 per cent.
The GSE Financial Stocks Index (GSE-FSI) also decreased by 0.15 per cent to settle at 2,205.98 points, making it a 1-week loss of 0.17 per cent, a 4-week loss of 0.31 per cent, and a year-to-date gain of 2.52 per cent.
Market Activity Reaches Crescendo
However, there was a tremendous amount of activity at the close of market session. At the end of Wednesday’s trading session on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), a total of 615,521,764 shares, corresponding to a market value of GHS 566,210,012.63, were traded.
Topping the chart of most traded stocks by volume was MTN Ghana with a record breaking 615 million traded shares. This was followed by SIC Insurance Company with 160,260 traded shares. Republic Bank Ghana also entered list with 7,489 traded shares, while Cal Bank completed the list of top movers with 6,000 traded shares.
Moreover, market breadth, which measures the investors’ sentiments, closed in favour of the bears as it also weakened. The situation was not different with the market capitalization. The market capitalization of the Ghana Stock Exchange declined by a whopping GH¢1 billion from GH¢63.8 previously recorded to GHS 62.8 billion.
Due to the harsh economic conditions in the country with inflation jumping to 19 year high 23.6%, coupled with negative sentiments on the stock market, equities analyst projects the weak sentiment to continue throughout the remainder of the week and into subsequent weeks given that there are no catalysts to boost the sentiment in the short term.
READ ALSO: UBA Ghana Posts Impressive Performance
