Tuesday, September 07, 2004

September 7 The Philippine Stock Market Daily Review: Collective Exuberance

September 7 The Philippine Stock Market Daily Review: Collective Exuberance

Wow, this is simply incredible!! Our projections of a baby bull due to the historical honeymoons, seasonal strength, technical breakout and most importantly the stockmarket cycle swings, seems to be unfolding right before our very eyes. In addition, even our prescriptions of how the market would rise (foreign buying on the blue chips and local buying on the broadmarket) are simply falling into place. Moreover, our supplications for a broader blue chip rally to compliment the one and a half year market leader PLDT emerged.

The Phisix rose to its highest level for the year at 1,671.26 a level seen last in February of 2001. Today’s robust gains of 38.22 points or 2.34% comes on the heels of a dramatically improved volume of P 1.195 billion or (US$ 21.291 million) and makes the Philippines bourse as Asia’s best performer for the day.

It was combined exuberance from local and foreign investors with the former dictating today’s trade. Foreigners scooped up Philippine equity assets centered mostly on the blue chips and registered a net inflow of P 368.167 million (US$ 6.563 million) that accounted for about 38% of today’s output. Notwithstanding foreign bullishness was pervasive as they bought more shares than they sold on the broader market.

Advancing issues beat declining issues by 2.5 to 1 while industry indices were all up led by the Property (+3.37%) sector followed by the Mining (+3.24%), Oil (+3.11%), Commercial Industrial (+2.34%), the All index (+.84%) and the Banking and Finance (.78%) index in view of the bullish ambiance.

As mentioned above foreign money found their way into the major blue chip issues such as San Miguel B (-.7%) were a significant cross trade accounted about 97% of the firms turnover, followed by PLDT, Globe Telecoms (+5.0%) Ayala Land (+5.26%) and Ayala Corp (+6.89%). It is one of the rare occasions to see Globe Telecoms upstage PLDT. The banking heavyweights BPI (unchanged) and Metrobank (+4.0%) recorded slight outflows together with SM Prime (+1.72%).

Second and third tier issues were the object of local investors speculative activities among the top gainers for the day are Acesite Philippines +47.45%, Mining issues Benguet Corp +40.62%, Omico Mining +30% and Abra +20%, Imperial Resources +26.31%, Edsa Property Holdings +20%, Pacifica +18.18, East Asia Power +16.66%, Metro Pacific +16% and Macro Asia Corp +15%.

In technical terms, we have seen two gaps in four sessions where it has yet to be established if these gaps represent ‘breakaway’ and ‘continuation’ gaps sequences or if would be subject to a closure in the coming sessions. Another is that based on channel trend lines today’s spike of the Phisix brings the benchmark index fast approaching the channel resistance levels at the 1,690s-level. Twice this year, I have noticed that for every record high the Phisix hit, it managed to retrace or correct (Jan-Mar, Apr-May) by about 10% before resuming its climb, if the Phisix would repeat the same pattern then the likely scenario is for the index to retreat to 1,520’s level after touching the 1,690’s before again establishing its year end record levels. Well that is IF it does follow the pattern. Other than that, we can only say the market internals continue to signal strong optimism from local investors which should provide a floor to any forthcoming profit taking activities.

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