Stocks keep slipping as investors react to dismal corporate earnings

The capital bourse – Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) – extended its downward trend for the second day in a row on Monday due to investors’ sale dominance and portfolio rebalancing in response to the corporate earnings disclosures for the latest quarter.

From late this month, most listed companies started announcing their latest quarterly earnings, and their rally of dismal performance escalated investors’ jitters regarding the market stability.

This is because, most of the investors, especially the cautions ones, were now offloading their securities to shun the chances of further losses, analysts said.

The DSEX, the benchmark index of the DSE, the premier bourse, plunged 9.5 points to settle at 6,279 against 6,288 in the previous trading session.

Among other indices, the DS30, the blue-chip index, dropped 5.4 points or 0.24 per cent to close at 2,225, and the DSES, the Shariah-based index, fell 1.6 points or 0.12 per cent to 1,370.

Meanwhile, the Dhaka bourse witnessed a marginal increase in participation, with the DSE turnover edging up by 4.2 per cent to Tk 509 crore against the tally of Tk 489 crore in the previous session.

The market remained downbeat throughout the session, with the majority of securities experiencing corrections due mainly to the sale dominance prevailing across the bourse, said EBL Securities, a stockbroker, in its daily market review.

Opportunist investors, however, were still chasing down some sector-specific issues that were somewhat immune to earnings volatility caused by the recent macroeconomic adversities, it added.

The IT sector topped the turnover chart with a contribution of 25.4 per cent to the total turnover of the prime bourse, followed by the pharma (11.9 per cent) and the paper (9.3 per cent) stocks.