Friday, 14th March 2014 | The Ghana Stock Market closed down for the third consecutive week this year with the GSE Composite index shedding 16.11 to close at 2,403.27. The GSE financial stock index, which closed down by 33.91 to 2,168.26 on the 28th February, has closed down 20 .77 points since then to land at 2,147.49. For the past week, 8 stocks advanced and 11 declined.
The recent decline has not dented the year-to-date gains with GSE Composite Index up 12.03 percent for the first 2 months of the year and the GSE financial stock index gaining 20.20 percent. The softer market comes against a background of slippage in the foreign exchange rate for the Ghana currency, which is down by 15 percent in value since the start of the year with the rate reaching GH¢ 2.552 at the end of the week compared with GH¢2.1616 to US$1. Also, there has been rising interest rates with the 91 T-bill rate for the auction on 14th March coming out at 22.8927% up from 19.2236% at the end of December 2013. The inflation rate remains at elevated levels with the annual (year-on-year) inflation rate to February 2014 at 14.0%.
Volumes were at 1.34 million units in the just concluded week, which is down from 2.7 million traded for the week ended March 7th. In February, 5.2 million traded in the first week, 3.6 million units for the second week, followed by 2,676,472 units in week three and just over 1 million units in the last week.
Main Advances | The stocks gaining most for the week include Aluworks up 20 percent; Cal Bank up 15 percent and Eco Bank up 5 percent.
Main declines | At the end of the week. the stocks that declined most include Benso Oil Palm Plantation that fell by 5 percent; Produce Buying Company down by 6 percent; Societe Generale Ghana a fall of 8 percent and Trust Bank down 17 percent.