Stock Market Watch: ASI Gains 3 Points, Closes below 20,000 Threshold

The Nigerian Stock Exchange closed in the green today as the bourse gained a marginal 3 points. Top gainers were predominantly out of the banking subsector of the Financial services sector. Stanbic and Fidelity gained 492 points, a tie for the market leader in terms of the share price appreciation metric today.

Access Bank followed closely gaining 419 points, even as the bank recently announced plans to fast-track its merger with Intercontinental Bank. Skye also gained a respectable 222 points.

Top tier banks, Zenith and GTBank were up a cumulative 24 points. First bank shed 24 points, even as UBA remained unchanged.

Ecobank shed 474 points, Sterling lost 300 points and Diamond Bank was out of 120 points at the end of trading today.

Custodian and Allied Insurance was the only gainer in the Insurance sub-sector today as the ticker picked up 476 points. Law Union and Rock was down 357 points even as Aiico shed 1.92% or 192 points.

The Oil and Gas sector was relatively quiet today with the exception of Oando that shed 68 points.

Activity was brimming in the infrastructure sector today. Cement manufacturers CCNN shed the full 5% allowed. Lafarge and Ashaka gained 167 and 40 points apiece.

Across the consumer goods space, the breweries sub-sector was led by Guinness as the beer manufacturer appreciated by 93 points, even as rival company Nigeria Breweries shed 203 points.

Honeywell Flour shed 481 hefty points today, leading the decline in the Food and Beverages sub sector. Dangote Sugar and Cadbury shed 89 and 18 points respectively. Gainers in the sector today were Nascon and Nestle picking up 49 and 17 points apiece.

Zenith led the volume charts with 88.5 million shares traded.

Over 262 million shares valued at over N 2.2 Billion were traded today.

The ASI closed at 19,791.