MTN Nigeria, Dangote Cement, Union Bank, others push stock market down

Nigerian equities market closes on a negative note as market capitalisation fell to N13.3 trillion.
Investors take profit in bellwether stocks such as MTN Nigeria, Dangote Cement, and other stocks.
Analysts expect the negative performance to persist in the absence of any major catalyst.

MTN Nigeria, Dangote Cement, Union Bank of Nigeria and others pushed stock market down on Monday as equities closed on negative note.

The NSE All-Shares-Index by 2.22% to close at 30,194.71 points as against 1.89% depreciation recorded last Friday. This resulted in investors losing N302.41 billion in value on a single day trading while market capitalisation fell to N13.3tn.

The market breath witnessed 14 gainers and 19 losers while its Year-to-Date (YTD) returns currently stands at -3.93%.

Top losers in the market

MTN Nigeria (- 7.1%)
Dangote Cement (-4.0%)
Union Bank Plc (-1.4%)
Forte Oil (-1.26%)
Africa Prudence (-2.70%)

Top gainers

ETI 9.45%
Unilever 8.71%
Dangote Flour 3.11%
Zenith Bank Plc 1.05%
GTBank 0.64%

The top traded stocks by volume were FIDELITY (28.3m units), ACCESS (20.3m units) and UBA (20.1m units) while MTNN (N948.2m), ZENITH (N168.3m) and ACCESS (N117.4m) led the top traded stocks by value.

Analysts at Afrinvest said attributed the bearish run of the market to investors booking profit in bellwether stocks such as MTN Nigeria, Dangote Cement, and others.

For the booked profit on large-cap stocks, analysts expect the negative performance to persist in the absence of any major catalyst.