The Pakistan Stock Exchange had another profitable session on Thursday as the KSE-100 Index again crossed the psychological barrier of 40,000 with a gain of 503.66 points.
By the time the trading was closed, the index was recorded at 40,353.62. The latest performance came after a 722.48 points jump yesterday.
It is obviously an encouraging sign given the Monday carnage when the KSE-100 Index had tumbled by around 1,000 points, just after a poor last week where the market lost 1,630.40 points amid the growing political instability and the prospects of a government-opposition showdown in coming weeks.
The overall volume recorded at the Wednesday session was 476,869,392 shares with 200 companies making gains in their value. However, the share prices of 160 entities were down. There was no change in the case of the remaining 17.
It was the oil and gas companies – both exploration and marketing – which had the strongest showing as a sector.
Earlier on Wednesday, sectors like automobile, cement, chemicals, engineering, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers as well as oil and gas marketing were among the best performers, as the companies managed to reduce their earlier losses.
Meanwhile, different categories of textile units and financial institutions too were among those making profits.
The Thursday session again saw Hascol Petroleum Limited proving to be a hotcake consistently. It was yet again the most active stock with the trading of 107,778,206 shares. It was again followed by Unity Foods Limited and TRG Pakistan Limited with 56,315,000 and 20,702,000 shares respectively.
On the other hand, Askari Life (R), which had a 39.13 percent cut its share price yesterday, made a gain of 92.86 percent to lead the pack of advancers. The next two on the list were Kohinoor Industries Limited and SME Leasing Limited. The respective gains in their share prices were 20.41 percent and 15.51 percent.
However, the three worst performing companies – Unicap Modaraba, Grays Leasing Limited and Shaheen Insurance Company Limited – were from the financial sector with 34.58 percent, 12.44 percent and 10.11 percent losses respectively.