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Capital Market still offers investment opportunities for Nigerians – Onyema

By BusinessNews Staff on November 7, 2015

The Chief Executive, Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr. Oscar Onyema, on Thursday said despite the low level of investor confidence, occasioned by market volatility and downturn in the All-Share index in the capital market, there still exists enormous investment opportunities for Nigerians to take advantage of.

Speaking with journalists in Abuja shortly after the 2015 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Kano/Kaduna branch council of the NSE, he argued that the market was currently a reflection the state of the economy.

The Kano/Kaduna branch council comprises Abuja, Kano, Kaduna, Yola and Bauchi units.

He said: “It would be surprising if the market is going up when the economy is having shocks. It’s important for investors to also understand that there’s been significant sell-off between last year and this year and it could present opportunity and again, it’s important to do the analysis and understand where those opportunities are and not only in the equities but across the various asset classes.”

He said: “So if you look at large cap, small cap and mid-cap securities, our small cap securities has done pretty well, we returned about 22 percent. Yes, the whole market is down about 15 percent but that is because of the weight of the large cap, so it’s important to dig deeper and understand the dynamics of the market and if you don’t time, engage your professionals to work you through all of that.”

However, he said except for the Lagos NSE, the Kano/Kaduna zone out-performed other zones in the country in the terms of volume of trading in the period under review.

He said the quantum of trading was much lower than the previous year due to oil price shocks while most of the trading activities had occurred in the Abuja branch.

He also said over 200 Financial Literacy Programmes (FLP) were held across the country to help investors understand the workings of the capital market. He said 107 of such trainings were carried out in the eastern part of the country while not much was achieved in the northern regime as a result of challenges of insecurity.

Meanwhile, a review of trading activities between January and October 2015 showed that trading volume and value declined by 28 percent and 34 percent respectively when compared to 2014.

Vice President of NSE, Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud, who presided over the AGM said 2015 had been challenging for the NSE branch offices due to the slowdown in national economy as well as investor apathy towards stock market investment.

On the aggregate, Abeokuta, Abuja, Bauchi, Benin, Ibadan, Ilorin, Kaduna, Kano, Onitsha, Owerri, Port Harcourt, Uyo and Yola accounted for N10.15 billion of the total market share of N780.65 billion as well as 1.24 billion in trading volume out of the entire 74.47 billion in the period under review.

Giving a projection into its 2016 branch operations, Mahmoud said: “We plan to implement the recently national council approved Branch Strategy throughout 2016. This comprehensive branch strategy that will see us locate to appropriate premises that will support our strategic intent for branches in five of our locations.”

[ThisDay]

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