Forte Oil, Ecobank added to MSCI Index
Forte Oil Plc and EcoBank Transnational Incorporated have been included in the MSCI’s Frontier Market Index.
MSCI is a leading provider of investment decision support tools to over 6,000 clients worldwide, ranging from large pension plans to boutique hedge funds.
The equity index provider, which has a presence in 23 countries, offers a range of products and services – including indexes, portfolio risk and performance analytics, and ESG data and research.
According to a statement, the changes were effected following the inclusion of thirteen securities into the MSCI Frontier Markets Index, while 30 were deleted from the index. MSCI Frontier Markets 100 Index was dominated by Kuwait (30 per cent from 20 per cent) and Nigeria (20 per cent from 13 per cent).
Pakistan, Oman, Argentina, Kenya and Morocco were in the five to seven per cent range (from three to four per cent).
The statement added, “With the new dimensioning, Nigeria consequently added two names (ETI and Forte Oil). On the deletions, they are almost all coming from the UAE (10 names) and Qatar (13 names).”
Analysts said the inclusion of Nigeria stocks into the index meant that investment inflow of over $200m would be redirected toward the Nigeria investment market, which is great for the country.
Forte Oil Plc’s inclusion on the index comes following its imressive performance in 2013.
The company had achieved a 1164.55 per cent share price growth to emerge the best performing and investment stock on the NSE in 2013 and recorded Year-to-date growth of 72.23 per cent in share price from N92.87 to N155.95 in 2014. ETI on the other hand depreciated YTD by 12.75 per cent to N14.30 per share.
About $8tn is benchmarked to MSCI indexes. The emerging markets index MSCIEF is up 2.9 per cent so far this year, while the all world index has risen 2.1 per cent.
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