The President and Chief Executive, PEARL Awards, Mr. Tayo Orekoya, has urged all stakeholders in the capital market to play an effective role in developing the market.

Orekoya told our correspondent in an interview on Thursday that various stakeholders in the capital market had responsibility to ensure the growth and sustained development of the market.

He said, “Starting from the investors, they must have a right attitude. The capital market is essentially a long term investment window. You could make some profit in the short term but you must have a balanced view in terms of your portfolio management. On the part of the operators, they must be willing to play by the games; insider dealings were largely responsible for the market collapse. Also, the regulator has a role to play. They must ensure that there is adequate investor education, and avoid policy summersault.”

He noted that the stock market was no doubt slowly but steadily recovering from the doldrums of previous years and had the potentials to once again be the toast of investors locally and globally.

“In order to create the necessary atmosphere for the growth and development of the capital market, active investor sensitisation and education is essential,” he added.

Speaking on the coming PEARL Awards, he said, “The PEARL Awards is the Performance, Earning and Returns Leadership Awards. It is an award to reward outstanding performance on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The awards have been on for the past 17 years, and it is in three main competitive categories. We have the sectoral awards, market excellence awards and the overall PEARL of the NSE.

“The sectoral leadership award is a category where companies in each sector of the NSE compete amongst one another, while the market excellence award is the award, where all the companies quoted on the NSE are analysed utilising each of the 10 indices. For instance, we may have each of the company being ranked based on earnings yield, dividend cover to mention a few.”

The biggest award, according to Oresanya, is the PEARL award.

He said, “In this group, each of the sectoral leaders comes to compete based on the points they gather in each of the market excellence indices. The sectoral leader that has the highest points emerges the PEARL of the Exchange.”

Source: Punch (written by Ademola Alawiye)