Stock market cools down

The stock market, which was on a bullish trend over past months, witnessed slowdown this week registering growth by only 0.18 point.

According to Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse), the stock market opened at 687.65 points on Sunday and closed at 687.83 points on Thursday. The market escalated to a new record on the second day and touched 695.68 points but started dropping from the third day with 695.38 points and 689.80 points on the fourth day before closing at 687.83 points on Thursday.

The total turnover slightly decreased this week to Rs 392.4 million with 591,776 unit shares having been traded through 2,270 transactions, against the last week's figure of Rs 393.5 million through the trading of 506,943 shares.

Out of the total 89 listed companies in the stock exchange, 59 companies saw their transactions this week.

The group wise analysis of share trading shows that major groups except commercial banks registered growth.

The commercial banks group, which was steadily driving the whole stock market up for the past weeks, registered a fall of 5.51 points. The group's index closed at 774.04 points, which had opened at 779.55 points.

Though, the hydropower and insurance groups continued their better performance. The hydropower group reached 998.44 points, up from 966.91 points, posting a growth of 31.53 points. Likewise, the insurance group also posted a double digit growth of 23.5 points, its index touched 654.68 points from 631.18 points.

The hotels group saw a rise of 1.54 points to 259.35 points from 257.81 points. Likewise, the finance group's index registered a growth of 2.94 points and closed at 476.83 points.

However, the index of the development banks group decreased by 0.86 point to 534.54 points from 535.40 points.

The manufacturing and the other groups, meanwhile, remained constant at 348.63 points and 818.12 points throughout the week.

Siddhartha Bank this week surpassed all by 246 transactions in total.

National Hydro Power led others by number of shares and trading volume. A total of 237,260 units of its shares were traded on a turnover of Rs 57 million.

The Nepse floor remained open for five days, where the shares of Nabil Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Himalayan Bank, Nepal SBI Bank, Everest Bank, NIC Bank, Bank of Kathmandu, Machhapuchhre Bank, Kumari Bank, National Hydropower Co, Chilime Hydropower Co, Sanima Development Bank and Gurkha Development Bank were traded throughout the week.