It was an eventful day for the local equities market on the penultimate day of the trading week which left the Ghana Stock Market benchmark with negligible losses following a two day rising streak.

Thursday’s loss was hugely spurred by a depreciation in the share price of Access Bank Ghana PLC. The day started with the main index testing the waters above 2,400 points, before settling for practically the same level as Wednesday.

In the aggregate, nine GSE listed equities participated in trading, ending with one loser, namely Access Bank Ghana (ACCESS), with 0.25% share price depreciation.

ACCESS closed its trading day (Thursday, February 16, 2023) at GHS4.00 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), recording a GHS0.01 drop from its previous closing price of GHS4.01.

Access Bank Ghana is the 16th most traded stock on the Ghana Stock Exchange over the past three months (Nov 15, 2022 – Feb 16, 2023). ACCESS has traded a total volume of 24,013 shares valued at GHS 96,089 over the period, with an average of 381 traded shares per session. A volume high of 20,000 was achieved on February 16, 2023 for the same period.

Access Bank Ghana is currently the 11th most valuable stock on the GSE with a market capitalization of GHS 696 million, which is about 1.08% of the Ghana Stock Exchange equity market.

Decline in Banking Stock

Meanwhile, the decline in banking stock caused the GSE Financial Stocks Index (GSE-FSI) to also decrease by 0.02% to settle at 1,983.51 points, making it a week-on-week loss of 0.82 percent, a month-on-month loss of 3.11 percent, and a year-to-date loss of 3.37 percent.

In the same vein, the general index- the benchmark GSE Composite Index (GSE-CI) pared marginally by 0.17 (-0.01%) points to close at 2,410.03 points, representing a 1-week gain of 0.31 percent, a 4-week loss of 1.05 percent, and an overall year-to-date loss of 1.39 percent.

However, there was a surge in trading activities on the day. At the end of Thursday’s trading session on the Ghana Stock Exchange, a total of 30,049 shares, corresponding to a market value of GHS 95,891.58, were traded. Compared with the previous GSE trading day (Wednesday, February 15), Thursday’s data showed 151 percent improvement in volume and 386 percent improvement in turnover.

Access Bank Ghana recorded the highest volume of 20,000 traded shares at the end of trading session. This was followed by Ghana Oil Company with 5,000 traded shares, whilst MTN Ghana (3,139) and GCB Bank (1,450) made the list of top 5 movers.

The market capitalization on the other hand, remained unchanged at GHS64.3 billion.