Stocks end a bearish week

Stocks in the bourses of Dhaka and Chattogram continued the bearish movement till the end of the week as the adverse macroeconomic updates and floods in the northeastern part of the country further battered investors' sentiment.

Indices stopped falling on Wednesday, following sharp declines over the previous sessions. However, due to selling pressure, the market on Thursday failed to sustain the early hour gains and closed near the week's low.

DSEX, the broad-based index of the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), closed at 6,327 on Thursday, a 1.53% fall in a week.
Blue-chip index DS30 fell by 1.26% over the week to close at 2,298.

Only 74 scrips on the DSE advanced last week, against a decline of 297, while the price of 19 remained unchanged.

Daily average turnover on the DSE declined 11.11% to Tk764 crore from the daily average of Tk860 crore in the previous week.

Investors were active mostly in miscellaneous, textile, and engineering stocks as the sectors individually contributed 10%-20% to the weekly turnover on the DSE.

No sector, except miscellaneous, paper, and fuel power, managed to avert corrections last week.

Services and real estate, ceramic, and general insurance led the losing sectors to have over 4% contraction in market capitalisation.

Since no scrip is allowed to fall by more than 2% in a single session nowadays, the top loser of the week did not even fall by a double-digit percentage point, while the daily upper circuit breaker of up to 10% helped top gainers march more freely.

Meghna Insurance, the newest stock on the bourses, gained over 60% last week and made the top position in the weekly gainers' list.

Information Services Ltd, Sonargaon Textile, Al-Haj Textile, Fine Foods, Sinobangla Industries, Titas Gas, Global Heavy Chemical,

Intech Ltd, and Premier Bank Perpetual Bond were the other nine of the top ten weekly gainers having secured 5-14% capital gains.

Apex Tannery, Peoples Insurance, Olympic Accessories, Eastland Insurance, Yeakin Polymer, Paramount Insurance, Rangpur Dairy, Asia Insurance, Sunlife Insurance, and the Bangladesh National Insurance were in the week's top ten losers in that order.

The market's average price-to-earnings ratio stood at 14.3, according to the DSE. Excluding the Z category stocks, the ratio came down to 13.9.

The listed scrips are trading at 1.7 times higher than their underlying net assets' value on average.

CSCX, the broad-based index of the Chittagong Stock Exchange, declined by 1.48% to 18,618 in the week.