KARACHI: The gains of 242 points seen on Wedn­esday after several days of successive declines turned out to be “bull trap” or merely a “dead cat bounce” phenomenon, for the market slipped again in the bearish trajectory on Thursday.

The trading remained range bound between intraday low and high of 202 and 179 points. The index finally settled at 47,271 points, showing day-on-day decline by 107 points.

Traders said that the prime minister’s visit to the city a day ago was a non-event. They believed that announcement of infrastructure projects could have provided the market with hopes of jump in demand of cyclicals cement and steel with the benefit travelling to other sectors.

A sentiment dampener turned out to the federal minister for planning and special initiatives opposing the approval of the refinery policy, arguing that the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) was the right forum to take up refining policy. As a results, ATRL, NRL, Byco and PRL lost ground and closed in the red zone.

Sector-wise, power, exploration & production and oil & gas marketing companies together scrapped 69 points from the index while banks and technology sectors made major contributors to the index. The earnings season has so failed to enthuse investors.

Foreigners bought blue chips worth $1.55m at dips. Among local participants, com­p­anies and insurance firms booked profit while indi­viduals and brokers added shares to their portfolio. The trading volume took steep dip of 40pc from the previous session to 230m shares. Sector-wise, the technology & communications, che­m­icals and food & personal care turned in high volume.

TRG recorded the highest volume for the day followed by GGL, WTL, TPLP and Byco.

The trading value decreased by 27pc to $70.4m. Among scrips, the leading gainers were MEBL (42 points), TRG (40 points), BAHL (14 points), MLCF (12 points) and HBL (8 points). Stocks that pulled down the index included Hubco (20 points), PSO (17 points), PPL (14 points), EFERT (13 points) and Lucky Cement (12 points).

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2021