The unrest in the city also hampered stock market sentiment as the benchmark depleted by 186 points in the preceding three days. Furthermore Friday’s volume turned out to be the lowest for the current year depicting investors’ cautious behavior. On the last day of the week news of Forex reserves crossing $18 billion mark turned out to be a surprise for most investors, but it was unable to impact the financial market.
Since the beginning of the new fiscal year, the index has declined by 0.85 per cent with average volumes of 58 million shares. Market’s performance at the end of a fiscal year tends to be fairly muted. Hopefully corporate result announcements will boost investor confidence and improve market performance. One should be cautious as fiscal year results are largely dominated by hefty dividend payments. This includes oil sector, interim fertilizer dividends along with few surprise dividend which may become a reason for improved investor sentiments.
Over the last few weeks participation of foreign element has been missing from the stock market, as indicated by the FIPS data. Over the last few weeks the index was manipulated by high-worth low-liquidity stocks including Nestle and Unilevers. We believe investors should also look at the price level of top tier volume leading stocks, said Bilal Asif at HMFS, adding that we expect the market to be filled with dividend announcements however political uncertainties will continue to dictate market terms.
