Nigerian Equities Market Update-07/05/18: NSEASI Maintains Sideway Trend as Traders Position for H1 Incentives

Trading activities on the floor of The Nigerian Stock Exchange took another marginal trip with the bear as the lead performance pointer- NSEASI gave up 11Bpts of its trading points. It was a mixed performance amongst the observed market indices as shown in the index movement table. By this performance, total points lost within the new month builds back to 23Bpts. See the index movement table for details.

Value loss by the market capitalization of the listed equities during today’s trading activities was N16.628 billion, same as 11Bpts below the opening value.  Meanwhile, trading activities for the day produced 21 advancers and 18 lagers. NSEASI Year to Date gain is now 7.66% while the Market Capitalization Year to Date gain stood at N1.304 trillion same as 9.59% above the year’s opening value.

Screening the market movement by the lead performance pointer’s trend, we have observed reluctance on the side of the traders. Recall that, six trading days back, NSEASI made a major step (precisely on 27^th April, 2018) away from the support line where it traded for the better part of the month of April but failed to effectively consolidate the move; rather, two mild gains welcomed the move, both on the 30^th April and 2^nd May. In other words, April trend seems to have re-dominated the market as NSEASI resumed another sideway trend.

In our opinion, should this trend linger around the market arena, exit points will be stretched and traders may start experiencing fear probably induced by anxiety to achieve their desired exit points. Nevertheless, we have noticed few equities attempting an up/down trend as against the market sideway trend.

On this strength we are of the opinion that playing the market by individual equities’ trend will avail traders some signals. We also maintained that long term investors should keep positioning in tranches into their various equities of choice. As the first quarter earnings season winds up, identifying equities with half year incentives for timely position is an intelligent investment decision. Safe Trade.