The Ghanaian Domestic equity bourse witnessed a moderate fall on Thursday as weakness across the financial sector saw GCB Bank PLC record losses on the back of Bank of Ghana’s aggressive policy tightening to fight inflation.

In Thursday’s trading session, profit taking investors dragged the equity markets across the black region of the curve, with the headline indices trading more than 9 points lower.

At the closing bell, out of the 15 GSE listed equities that participated in trading, the session ended with one loser, namely GCB Bank, with 10% share price depreciation.

GCB Bank Limited (GCB) closed Thursday’s trading day (Thursday, February 2, 2023) at GHS3.51 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording a GHS0.41 drop from its previous closing price of GHS3.90. However, GCB began the year with a share price of GHS3.94 but has since lost 10.9 percent off that price valuation, ranking it 35th on the GSE in terms of year-to-date performance.

GCB Bank is the sixth most traded stock on the Ghana Stock Exchange over the past three months (Nov 1, 2022 – Feb 2, 2023). GCB has traded a total volume of 494,269 shares valued at GHS 1.95 million over the period, with an average of 7,846 traded shares per session. A volume high of 262,620 was achieved on January 20, 2023 for the same period.

GCB is traded on the GSE under the ticker symbol “GCB”. The International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) of GSE:GCB is GH0000000094. GCB Bank Limited is currently the ninth most valuable stock on the GSE with a market capitalization of GHS 930 million, which makes about 1.45% of the Ghana Stock Exchange equity market.

Owing to Thursday’s performance, the benchmark GSE Composite Index (GSE-CI) shed 9.90 points to close at 2,401.50 points, which represents a decline of 0.41 percent on the previous trading session. On the week-on-week basis, it led to a 1-week loss of 1.22 percent, a 4-week loss of 1.74 percent, and an overall year-to-date loss of 1.74 percent.

The GSE Financial Stocks Index (GSE-FSI) which measures all stocks from the banking sector and insurance, also decreased by 0.88% to 2,018.12 points as a result of the GCB which is a financial sector stocks losing, making it a 1-week loss of 1.21%, a 4-week loss of 1.68%, and a year-to-date loss of 1.68%.

Trading Activity Appreciates

Despite the decline in key indices, trading activity appreciates considerably. At the end of Thursday’s trading session on the Ghana Stock Exchange, a total of 332,028 shares, corresponding to a market value of GHS 115,716.71, were traded.

Compared with the previous GSE trading day (Wednesday, February 1), Thursday’s data showed 740 percent improvement in volume and 375 percent improvement in turnover.

SIC Insurance Company recorded the highest volume of 316,352 traded shares. It was followed by MTN Ghana with 8,072 traded shares, while CAL Bank also recorded 3,905 traded shares, with GCB Bank PLC completing the list with 1,581 traded shares.

However, the market capitalization which measures how much a company is worth as determined by the stock market, hence the total market value of all outstanding shares, declined by GHS100,000 to settle at GHS 64.2 billion from GHS 64.3 billion recorded in the previous session.