THE MARKET recovered slightly yesterday but the 0.76 per cent increase was no cause for celebration with the all-share index closing low at 318.94 points.
Opening at around the 321 level, the index rose rapidly some 2.5 per cent to 325 but hopes were short lived as investors watched it plunge back to 320 by mid session, a level it maintained for another 30 minutes before dropping again.
Volume was low at only £16.7 million, around 40 per cent less than Monday as uncertainty continued to reign and forecasts of doom and gloom pervaded the trading floor.
Bank of Cyprus (BoC) which suspended trading last Friday for the duration of its Greek IPO was noticeable by its absence as investor focus shifted to Laiki.
“Laiki has been getting a lot of attention the last couple of days. We haven’t seen investors keen on banks lately so this might be a positive sign, if, and only if, investors are tired of speculating and are looking to invest long-term in fundamentally sound companies, hence choosing Laiki,” a CSE analyst said yesterday. “One other reason for the heavy volume on Laiki is that stockbrokers are encouraging investors to start buying shares in order to stabilise the index and Laiki is probably the share of their choice especially now that the Bank of Cyprus is not trading.”
Laiki absorbed about 23 per cent of yesterday’s turnover with over £3.78 million in volume although the stock lost 0.36 per cent to close at £8.22.
Most sectors were up yesterday with winning companies outdoing losers by 89 to 54 while 41 remained unchanged. Best performing sector was building and construction, which gained 6.86 per cent. Worst performing of the only three sectors which ended in the red were fish culture companies losing 3.06 per cent, while the financial and IT sectors dropped 1.8 per cent and 0.91 per cent respectively.
In the insurance sector which gained 5.44 per cent, Liberty Life added 13 cents to end at £1.77 while in manufacturing which ended 3.43 per cent up, Lanitis (Coca Cola) added four cents to close at 54 cents with 1.77 million shares changing hands on the share’s second day of trading. The stock
finished second on the active trading list with an 8.65 per cent gain.
“Investors grabbed the opportunity to buy the shares of Coca-Cola at nearly the same price a tin of Coke costs,” the CSE analyst said.
Heavy trading also took place in CLR stocks with over 1.26 million traded, the share gaining half a cent to finish at 30 cents. Logicom also came out on top, jumping 13 cents to close at £4.78 while `big brother’ GlobalSoft saw a decline of seven cents to end at £5.95 on a lower than usual volume of 130,000 shares traded.
“There is still too much uncertainty and lack of liquidity which will probably keep the index from rising,” the CSE analyst said. “Let us not forget that the index is misleading and one should not look at the index by itself and judge the listed shares as a whole. In the last 8 – 12 months some shares have given up as much as 1000% while others have risen 300%, so lets be more specific and look at the shares themselves.”
ENDS
