Kathmandu, December 22: The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) index last week ((Dec 15 to 19) lost 23 points in its index to close at 1,149.64 points. The short-term profit booking in insurance and microfinance stocks dragged its down, thus erasing most of the previous week’s gains.
The market that opened at 1,172.64 points lost 4.77 points on Sunday. On Monday it again went down by 13.51 points. On Tuesday, the benchmark index, however, inched up 1.26 points, before going down again by 3.30 points and 2.42 points on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.
Overall, the benchmark index closed the last week with a fall of 1.96%.
The sensitive index that measures the trading of shares of blue chips companies also went down by 3.76 points to close at 251.84 points.
During the review period, the Life Insurance and Non-Life Insurance sub-indices both fell over 5% each. The Hotel Sector closely followed and closed down by 4.89%. The Hydropower and Microfinance sub-indices, meanwhile, slumped over 3% each. The Banking sub-index also witnessed a drop of almost 1%. Besides, all other sectors registered modest losses, barring the Trading sub-index which rallied over 10% in the week.
In terms of individual companies, shares of NMB Bank continued to post the highest turnover of the week. More than Rs 316 million worth of the bank’s shares were transacted during the review period. Nepal Bank Limited registered a turnover of Rs 106.84 million. Similarly, Nepal Life Insurance Company posted a total transaction of Rs 76.88 million. The turnover f NIC Asia Bank and Shivam Cements Ltd stood at Rs 72.52 million and Rs 51.40 million respectively.
With a notable fall in share prices of the majority of the sub-groups including the commercial banks, the market capitalization declined to Rs 1,460.36 billion from Rs 1,489.58 billion, wiping Rs 29.22 billion in the book value of the investment portfolio.
