Tuesday, September 21, 2004

September 21 Philippine Stock Market Daily Review: A Reprise of Yesterday

September 21 Philippine Stock Market Daily Review

A Reprise of Yesterday

It was much of a reprise of yesterday’s activities characterized by foreign money shoring up the index heavyweights, ergo lifting the index, while the locals were still on a profit taking mood resulting to a mixed broad market.

The Phisix closed higher for the second consecutive session by 18.47 points or 1.09% on moderate volume of P 880.007 million (US $15.658 million) and was the second best performer among the broadly buoyant Asian Bourses next to Taiwan, as of this writing. While the Peso volume turnover on the surface looked impressively sturdy, dissecting the figures show that special block sales and cross trades accounted for 54.61% of today’s output. This means that board transactions, net of the special block sales of Ginebra San Miguel and the cumulative cross transactions, amounted to only P 399.399 million (US $ 7.107 million).

Capital fluxes from foreign money registered a positive P 97.496 million representing about 11.08% of today’s output. Similar to yesterday, ALL index heavyweights accounted for inflows EXCEPT for PLDT (-1.1%). However, the issue that tallied the most influxes was Aboitiz Equity Ventures (+3.03%). Aside, foreign money bought more issues on the broadmarket than it sold and these buying support practically lifted all the INDEX issues again except PLDT, namely Globe Telecoms (+2.94%), Ayala Corp (+4.83%), Metrobank (+3.63%), Ayala Land (+1.61%), Bank of the Philippine Islands (+1.12%) and SM Primeholdings (unchanged). Of course, as your prudent investor-analyst forecasted in his latest newsletter, this we believe, is largely due to refreshed expectations of continued accommodative global monetary policies which provides foreign money institutions opportunity to lever on their investment funds.

On the broadmarket, internals exhibited a mixed sentiment despite the rise of the key benchmark. Declining issues edged advancing issues by 32 to 29, while number of trades for the day continued its fall to 107. On the other hand, industry sub-indices were mostly up led by the Financials (+1.46%), Commercial and Industrial (+1.033%) and the Property index (+.48%), while the Mining (-1.24%) and the ALL (-.12%) index posted declines. The Oil index remained neutral in spite of the fact that crude oil price trades at the $46 per barrel levels.

While we have rightly seen the foreign money plays into the index in the past two sessions what puzzles your analyst is the continued easing of local participation in the market. One enlightening event is that where previously the bulk of foreign money went almost singlehandedly into PLDT, in the past two sessions it has spread among the blue chips giving PLDT the market leader since 2003’s run-up a much deserving rest.

And another observation, the rise in Aboitiz Equity Ventures as noted above has been primarily due to cross transactions (the largest share for today) by a single broker. In other words, about 96.94% or 45.498 million shares (data from citiseconline.com) of the traded shares of AEV were executed by a single broker distributed into four fluctuations which obviously resulted to the 3.03% rise. Any abnormalities, go figure.

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