Movers & Shakers: March 14, 2014

Botswana: DCI -0.53%, USD 18.8m

Today was all about Letshego as a massive cross went through at 225t. Outside of this there was some small trading in Choppies (400t) but nothing much else.

Egypt: Closed for the day.

Kenya: NSE 20 +0.47%, USD 10.0m

An impressive day to end the week as value traded amounted to $10.0m thanks to a large cross in Kenya Commercial Bank as a total of 7.56m shares changed hands in the counter with foreigners dominating activity in the counter. EABL was also rather active as foreigners dominated sales in the brewer with the counter falling -0.4% on 650k shares. The usually illiquid Jubilee was rather active today as 209k shares traded with locals on both sides of the name. Safaricom retreated 2.4% to KES 12.05 on profit taking after yesterday’s strong performance. The telco is rumored to have plans to launch an NFC enabled SIM card to entrench M-Pesa ahead of government plans to go cashless in April. The government has separately announced plans to come up with a new spectrum policy ahead of launch of LTE networks by mobile network operators once it is released by analogue television stations.

Mauritius: Semdex -0.20%, USD 860k

The Sem-7 ground higher by 34bps on thin volumes. The biggest riser was SBM which gained 95bps to Rs1.06 while the other gainers were IBL (+92bps, Rs110), Alteo (+89bps, Rs34) and ENL Land (+10bps, Rs49.50). The only faller was Terra which lost 26bps to Rs38.30.

Nigeria: ASI -0.86%, USD 23.3m

The session started slowly yet again but some crossing later in the day increased proceedings. Banks (-2%) remain rooted on the back foot with all names closing in the red. The biggest losers were FBNH (-3.55%, N11.67) and Zenith (-3.17%, N21.38) while GTB (-2.47%, N23.70) released their FY13 results just before the session closed. The consumers slipped by 43bps with DangSuga (-9.67%, N9.44) the main reason for this. in the cements, Wapco saw some chunky crossing and closed down 1.33% at N111. There was also a chunky cross in UBCAP which accounted for more than $4m worth of turnover.

Please note that the index figure above is correct at the time of writing.

South Africa: Top 40 -1.07%, USD 1.79bn

The JSE ended the day lower with the Top 40 index falling 1.07% to close at 41,761 while value traded amounted to USD 1.79bn. Industrials were the day's biggest losers with the Index falling 1.33% followed by Resources and Financials which fell 0.81% and 0.24% respectively. The Rand was trading at 10.75 and 14.96 to the USD and EUR respectively by the time local markets closed.

Zimbabwe: Industrials -0.13%, Mining unch, USD 520k

The ZSE reversed yesterday’s marginal gains with the main stream industrial index falling -0.13% to 186.22pts in a somewhat subdued week ending session. The mining index on the other hand remained flat at 33.16pts its third successive session at the same level. Activity aggregates trekked southwards with the volume of shares that exchanged hands in the session being -64.8% lower than yesterday at 3.15m shares. Likewise the value of trades took a -35.0% dip on yesterday to $0.52m as Hippo, Delta and Econet emerged the most liquid stocks on the day with respective contributions of 31%, 23.7% and 13% to the day’s total outturn. The volume drivers for the day were Cottco (41%) and Bindura (13%). The market registered a seventh net foreign outflow position after notching $72,388 in foreign portfolios divestments while there were no inflows from foreigners in today’s session.

African Currencies