NEPSE drops 29 pts on blockade

Kathmandu November 1- As the economy stumbles under the prolonged banda in Tarai and Indian blockade, the Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) plunged 29.01 points to slip below 1,100 points last week. The secondary market that opened at 1,121.05 points, closed at 1,092.04.

 Over the past four days, the benchmark index fell for successive two trading days before recovering 7.67 points on Thursday. Of the nine trading groups, indices of seven witnessed a downfall.

The benchmark of insurance fell 147.46 points, the biggest plunge over the review period. That was followed by hotels, commercial banks, hydropower companies, development banks, finance companies and ‘others’.

The NEPSE index of two groups–manufacturing and trading—remained stable at 1,886.14 and 207.97 points throughout the weekdays.

Similarly, the sensitive index that measures the performance of blue chips companies also dipped 6.4 points to close at 235.83. The secondary market witnessed a transaction worth Rs804.4 million from trading of 1,327,280 shares.

As for the individual companies, Nepal Investment Bank (promoters’ shares) led both in terms of the transaction volume and number of shares. There was transaction of Rs85.6 million out of trading of 105,000 units of the company’s promoters’ shares.

Nepal Investment Bank (general shares), Everest Nepal, National Life Insurance and Nepal Life Insurance were among the top five companies in terms of transaction amount.