Invest Data Consulting Ltd

AGAIN, IT’S CAUTION, AS INVESTORS, TRADERS AWAIT MORE DATA, BREAKDOWN OF 2018 BUDGET Nigeria’s equity market on Wednesday had a very volatile session, but continued its uptrend despite the seemingly weak market breadth, closing higher on the strength of last minutes appreciation in the share price of Dangote Cement (which alone accounts for about one-third of total market capitalization), following which it traded above the psychological line of 37,000 level on a low volume that made technicals for the day weak and mixed.  During, the trading session price performance of banking stocks were mixed as the sector’s index, as well as the NSE Insurance closed lower. The fact that the Tuesday’s presentation of a N8.6tr Appropriation Bill for 2018 had little or no impact on the market, could mean that investors are indifferent to the fiscal spending plan, given, like Investdata noted in its update of Tuesday, that the effect of the 2016 budget and the current one (2017) has n...

The expected earnings release date for companies quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has been estimated by Investdata based on their historical report dates. As the market has entered the mid-month of the deadline for submitting audited financials for companies with March 31, 2017 year-end, it is expected that more earnings reports will hit the market going forward in this month of June, July and August. Considering the increasing numbers of companies paying interim dividend, this expectation is likely to add more momentum to the market for Q2 earnings season as investors look forward to cash or scrip dividends from full-year and half-year accounts of companies. This however depends on the strength of the earnings reported. The earliest filer of March year-end account, International Brewery, released its 2017 full-year earnings report to the market on Friday and the numbers posted were mixed with sales revenue for the period growing by 40.58% to N32.77bn, while profi...