Thursday, September 09, 2004

September 9 Philippine Stock Market Review: Deceleration

September 9 Philippine Stock Market Review: Deceleration

The torrid rise of the Phisix for the 7th consecutive session has brought about a month to date gains of a phenomenal 10.13%. For the week alone the Philippine benchmark is up 6.88% inclusive of today’s .66% or 11.47 points gain.

Compared against yesterday’s exceptional record-breaking performance, the broader market, while still on an uptick has manifested signs of deceleration as seen by the narrowing advance decline ratio (yesterday’s almost 7 to 1 vis-à-vis today’s 2 to 1). Moreover, the market leaders seen previously in Metro Pacific (-10.16%), DM Consunji (-5.5%) and Piltel (-3.57%) has started to undergo profit-taking activities, which apparently confirms yesterday’s slowdown.

Select blue chips issues buoyed by foreign take-up were the primary cause to the Phisix’s rise. Foreign money regained command of the market as foreigner’s share of activities accounted for 51.28% of the today’s trades. Foreign money registered P 198.060 million of inflows directed mostly to choiced blue chips issues such as Bank of the Philippine Islands (+3.39%), Globe Telecoms (+1.5%), PLDT (+1.09%), Ayala Land (unchanged) and SM Primeholdings (-1.56%), although Ayala Corp (unchanged) and Metrobank (unchanged) likewise registered minor inflows.

Industry indices still manifest broad sector optimism although the best gainers were the extractive industries led by the Oil (+5.98%) and Mining (+3.72%) and the Finance (+2.46%) indices. Only the property index posted a decline.

With the market leaders apparently on a decline, compounded by the narrowing advance decline ratio and lastly the switching of investor interest to oil and mining issues may imply that an imminent correction is most probably due soon (next week). While tomorrow may yet register a positive output by the Phisix the probability is that this would be rather subdued with a largely mixed broad market sentiment. Otherwise, the bulls would be in a short-term furlough.

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