Kathmandu, September 1 : The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) has gone down by 1.37 percent (a double digit value of 16.65 points) in the last week due to the government’s delay in implementing a number of policy measures.
This was the successive fourth week that the country’s only secondary market dipped by double digit points. Over the period, the market went down by 67.65 points in total.
The market opened at 1,213.07 points on Sunday and fell 3.45 points to close at 1,209.62 points. On Monday too, the secondary market shed 6.49 points followed by a gain of 4.88 points on Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday, the market again went down 10.26 points and 1.33 points respectively.
Stockbrokers said the government authorities are yet to finalise the issues such as calculation modality of capital gains, margin trading and issuing brokerage licences banks. According to them, the investors have lost the confident to inject huge amount of money despite a number of listed companies announcing bonus out of the profits they earned in the last fiscal year.
The sensitive index that measures the performance of blue chips companies also went down 2.46 points to close at 261.25 points, with a downfall in indices of the majority of trading groups along with the commercial bank that holds largest proportion in the market capitalisation.
Last week, investors lost Rs 20.34 billion in the book value of their investment portfolio, after the market capitalisation declined to Rs 1,519.46 billion from Rs 1,539.80 billion.
Except trading, rest of 10 groups observed a fall in their indices during the review period. Life Insurance with a drop of 211.17 points posted the biggest loss, closing at 5,491.79 points. Life-insurance also shed 120.54 points.
Manufacturing, hydropower, hotels, ‘others’ and commercial banks lost their indices in double-digit values. Indices of microfinance, development banks and finance companies fell by marginal points.
Trading was the only gainer over the review period, with adding three points in its index.
Regarding individual companies, promoter shares of Rural Microfinance Development Centre recorded the largest transaction worth Rs105.47 million. In this segment, promoter share of Prabhu Bank was in the second position, followed by NIC Asia Bank, Nepal Bank Limited and Kumari Bank Limited.
Last week, stocks worth Rs1.62 billion were traded which was 5.2 percent more than the amount registered in the previous week. The total number of traded shares however went down to 6,024,980 units from 6,100,560 units.
During the review period, Nepal Stock Exchange listed a total of 21,189,564.48 units of primary shares of six companies.
