Culled—Proshare

March 12, 2018/Afrinvest

Market Last Week (Our Observation)
The local bourse sustained a positive performance for the second consecutive week as the All Share Index (ASI) rose 0.7% W-o-W to 43,167.87 points while YTD return improved to 12.9%

Across sectors, performance was largely mixed as 3 of 5 indices closed in the green. The Oil & Gas index appreciated the most, up 5.6% W-o-W. The Consumer and Industrial Goods indices followed suit, rising 1.7% apiece. On the flipside, the Banking and Insurance indices closed 1.1% and 0.7% lower W-o-W respectively.

JAPAUL OIL (+54.0%), HMARKINS (+34.5%) and LASACO (+25.7%) were the best performing stocks for the week while REGALINS (-27.1%), AFRINSUR (-13.9%) and FTNCOCOA (-13.5%) led the losers chart.

Market This Week (Our expectations)
The Afrinvest Weekly sentiment indicator stayed flat at 0.9 following sustained buying interest in medium cap stocks in anticipation of the release of earnings scorecards as well as improvements in market breadth.

Earnings of companies that have published results have been largely positive and this week, we expect market performance to remain upbeat as investors take position in fundamentally sound stocks in anticipation of more corporate scorecard releases.

Our March 2018 equity watchlist comprises of ACCESS, UBA, OKOMU OIL, MANSARD and FLOURMILLS.