Adnan Adams Mohammed
The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) Financial Index, last week, recorded no gains or losses, closing at 1,706.66 with a -15.50% year-to-date return while the SAS Manufacturing Index remained unchanged at 2,599.53 with a year-to-date return of -25.33%.
Trading activity strengthened as 85,632 shares valued at GH¢53,668 changed hands from 18,815 shares valued at GH¢18,954 in the previous session. With CAL Bank dominated trades by volume and value, accounting for 58.39% of the total volume traded and 60.56% of the total value traded.
MTN Ghana (-1.72%), the sole decliner at the session, moderated the benchmark index by 11.84 points (-0.63%) to close at 1,865.69 with a year-to-date return of -17.34% while the market capitalization decreased by 0.23% to settle at 52.60 billion.
“We expect activity levels to increase as investors take advantage of bargain stocks”, SAS Ghana has said.
Also, the Exchange recorded a total of more than 262.2 million traded shares valued at GH¢194 million in the first six months of 2020 amid the uncertainty of the novel COVID-19.
The performance, from January to June 2020, represents 107.9 percent growth in volumes and 87.7 percent in value traded over the same period in 2019.
On a month-on-month basis, trading volumes recorded a dip of 16 percent at the end of June after an impressive run in May 2020.
60.74 million shares were traded in June compared with 72.61 million shares in May.
This resulted in a total value of GHc46.983 million recorded in June as against GHc47.825 million recorded in May, representing a slight fall of 1.76 percent.
Daily average value recorded in June was GHc2.174 million compared to GHc2.517 million recorded in May 2020.
The GSE Composite index as at the end of June 2020 had continued the downward trend to record a decline of 15.83 percent (YTD) compared to the 14.01 percent (YTD) fall as at the end of May 2020.
On the bonds market, trade volume for the first six months of 2020 was up 49.7 percent over the same period in 2019.
Again the half-year trade volume of 49,519 million is 89 percent of the total trade volume in 2019, the Ghana Stock Exchange said.
The volume of securities traded for the month of June 2020 increased by 145 million over the May 2020 figure of more than 8.8 billion while the liquidity of the market went up to 54 percent at the end of June from 32 percent in May, 2020.
