ISLAMABAD (PEN) : After days of selling pressure, bullish momentum returned to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), with the benchmark KSE-100 gaining nearly 700 points during intra-day trading on Thursday.
At 1:05pm, the benchmark index was hovering at 114,123.54, an increase of 680.11 points or 0.6%.
Buying was observed in key sectors including automobile assemblers, commercial banks, cement, fertilizer, oil and gas exploration companies, OMCs and power generation. Index-heavy stocks including OGDC, HUBCO, PSO, SNGPL, SSGC, PPL, POL, MCB, NBP and UBL traded in the green.
This recovery follows a sharp decline on Wednesday when the KSE-100 Index settled lower by nearly 1,600 points at 113,443.43 amid late-session selling.
Globally, Asia shares rose on Thursday, helped by a jump in their Chinese counterparts on Beijing’s latest measures to shore up its crumbling stock market, while elsewhere, investors continued to have their eyes on US President Donald Trump’s policy plans.
China on Thursday announced a plan to guide hundreds of billions of yuan of new capital from state-owned insurers into stocks each year, in a sign of Beijing’s concern about sagging Chinese stocks, which surged on the back of the announcements.
The CSI300 blue-chip index advanced 1.47% shortly after the open, while the Shanghai Composite Index jumped 1.62%.
Trump on Tuesday said his administration was discussing a 10% punitive duty on Chinese imports because fentanyl is being sent from China to the U.S. via Mexico and Canada.
The big moves in Chinese stocks helped lift MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan up 0.11%, reversing its losses from earlier in the session.
Elsewhere, Japan’s Nikkei ticked up 0.47%.
In the broader market, global shares gave up some of the enthusiasm from Trump’s mammoth spending plans for artificial intelligence infrastructure that had turbocharged a rally in technology stocks.