Afrinvest puts GTB, NB, Guinness, Dangote Cement, Mansard on watchlist for May

Analysts at Afrinvest Research say their equity watchlist for the month of May consists of Guaranty Trust Bank, Nigerian Breweries, Guinness, Dangote Cement, and Mansard. This is just as they recommend hold for stocks of PZ.

A watchlist is a list of securities being monitored for potential trading or investing opportunities. It is a list of securities selected for special surveillance by a brokerage, exchange, or regulatory organization. Firms on the list are often stocks showing unusual activity.

In their stock recommendation for the week in a note to investors Monday, the analysts equally recommend investors to reduce their holdings in ETI and Union Bank as against a previous sell recommendation.

They noted that their weekly sentiment indicator weakened to 1.0 points from 1.8 points in the previous week, which dragged a fall in average volume traded in the local bourse, and that notwithstanding the sell-offs recorded in the past weeks, they are optimistic that sentiments will be largely driven by the positive outlook for the economy following the release of Q1:2018 GDP figures.

Last week, the local bourse recorded the third consecutive week of decline as the All Share Index (ASI) contracted 1.3 percent week-on-week to settle at 40,472.45 points while year-to-date return fell to 5.8 percent.

Sector performance was bearish as four of five indices under our coverage declined w-o-w. The banking, oil & gas, industrial goods and insurance indices fell 2.8 percent, 2.6 percent, 1.4 percent and 0.8 percent respectively.

The consumer goods index was the lone gainer last week, rising 4bps w-o-w.

The best performing stocks were SOVRENINS (+30.0%), MBENEFIT (+17.9%) and NPFMCRFB (+10.2%) while JAPAULOIL (-25.0%), SKYE (-19.1%) and DIAMOND (-18.4%) were the worst performers.