By Francis Ekeh

Tuesday’s trading session at the Nigerian Exchange limited, NGX witnessed improved performance as against last week with the domestic equity market gaining 0.5% while the NGX benchmark index closed at 47,565.92 points.

Consequently, the Year-to-date (YTD) return of the market strengthened to 11.4% from 10.9% the previous trading day.

Top gainers in the day’s trading session were led by MAYBAKER (+9.8%), IKEJAHOTEL (+9.7%) and BUACEMENT (+8.7%). However, UPL (-8.5%), CADBURY (-6.9%) and FTNCOCOA (-6.7%) posted as today’s top losers.

For Tuesday’s trading session, the total volume traded declined by 8.5% to 125.6mn units and value traded gained 11.1% to ₦1.9bn. GTCO, FBNH and TRANSCORP led the volume chart with 38.8mn units, 22.8mn units and 9.6mn units respectively.

On the other hand, GTCO, SEPLAT and FBNH led the value chart with ₦659.1mn, ₦308.4mn and ₦216.9mn respectively.

Across sectors, performance was mixed as three indices closed in green while two indices closed in red.

Performance for the Industrial Goods index indicates that it led the gainers with 3.2%, followed by the Banking and Insurance indices which gained 0.8% and 0.2% respectively.

The gains were attributed to buyers’ interests in BUACEMENT (+8.7%), UNITYBNK (+7.3%), and CORNERST (+8.0%) respectively.

However, the Oil and Gas and Consumer Goods indices declined by 2.4% and 0.1% respectively which were majorly attributed to investors’ selloffs in CADBURY (-6.9%) and SEPLAT (-4.0%).