The KSE-100 Index was up by 428.17 points on Monday as the Pakistan Stock Exchange continued making gains as part of the recent positive trend.

With the latest gains, the index closed at 36,618.57 as a total of 324,378,706 shares of 373 companies were traded during the session. Out of these, the share prices of 211 companies went up, 145 shed their value while 17 remained unchanged.

Since July 1, the KSE-100 Index has gained 2,186.88 points and did not experience a negative session during these days. As far as the weekly progress was concerned, the index made a gain of 1,139.02 points in the last week.

On Monday, five out of the top 10 stocks were of the cement companies as the share prices of all the 18 companies went up during the session.

Maple Leaf Cement Factory Limited proved to be the most active stock with 76,450,000 shares traded. The second and third were Pak Elektron Limited and TRG Pakistan Limited with 21,923,000 and 21,222,000 shares respectively.

On the other hand, the share price of JA Textile Mills Limited went up by 30.12 percent, making it the best performer in terms of value. It was followed by DS Industries Limited and Unicap Modaraba with a 20 percent gain each.

But it wasn’t good session for First National Bank Modaraba whose share price was down by 21.90 percent. Similarly, the value of Popular Islamic Modaraba was slashed by 17.50 percent and of Ashfaq Textile Mills Limited by 12.48 percent.

So far, 2020 has been a turbulent year for market. The KSE-100 Index had closed 2019 at 40,735.08. It moved upward till January 10 and reached the level of 43,207.05. However, it was followed by a mini-slide with the index down to 39,296.70 on February 10.

But it was period from March 6 to March 25 during which the market went south as the index slid to 27,228.80, representing a loss of 12,153.11 points. Since then the market has been trying to recover from this freefall and has now reached 36,618.57. This latest series of positive results will certainly help the market in restoring confidence and attaining the goals of stability and upward movement.