KARACHI: The stock market went through anot­her range-bound session on Thursday even though the benchmark opened and closed in the green zone.

Arif Habib Ltd said investors’ participation remained low, which caused the trading volume to decline sharply. The index fluctuated in both directions, but ended up in the green as the IT sector remained in the limelight.

Analyst Ahsan Mehanti noted that selected stocks showed recovery as the earnings season rally began to catch momentum on the exchange. Investors accou­nted for falling government bond yields amid the status quo in the policy rate.

Trading is likely to stay range-bound in the coming sessions, said JS Global, while recommending that investors should treat any downside as an opportunity to buy in cement and technology sectors.

As a result, the KSE-100 index settled at 42,085.72 points, up 78.58 points or 0.19 per cent from the preceding session.

The trading volume decr­eased 6.9pc to 222.2 million shares while the traded value went up 22.8pc to $44.3m on a day-on-day basis.

Stocks contributing significantly to the traded volume included WorldCall Telecom Ltd (50.6m shares), TRG Pakistan Ltd (23.2m shares), Pakistan Refinery Ltd (9.6m shares), Netsol Technologies Ltd (8.1m shares) and Telecard Ltd (6.5m shares).

Sectors that contributed to the index performance were technology (77.1 points), explo­­ration and production (15.5 points), refinery (8.1 points), chemical (eight poi­n­ts) and fertiliser (6.6 points).

Companies registering the biggest increase in their share prices in absolute terms were Colgate-Palm­olive Paki­stan Ltd (Rs72.21), Sapp­hire Textile Mills Ltd (Rs35), JDW Sugar Mills Ltd (Rs27.01), Al-Abbas Sugar Mills Ltd (Rs22.45) and Premium Textile Mills Ltd (Rs21.50).

Shares that declined the most in rupee terms were Faisal Spinning Mills Ltd (Rs25), Reliance Cotton Spin­ning Mills Ltd (Rs24), Pakistan Engineering Comp­any Ltd (Rs15.83), Dadex Eternit Ltd (Rs6.21) and Murree Brewery Company Ltd (Rs6.01).

Foreign investors remai­ned net sellers as they offloaded shares worth $0.31m.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2022