The Ghana Stock Exchange says there has been a return of some movement on the stock market in the last few weeks.
This is as a result of a regained confidence in the banking sector after the Bank of Ghana (BoG) completed its clean up.
Deputy Managing Director of the Ghana Stock Exchange, Ekow Afedzie noted that the market will be doing a more aggressive campaign to boost listing and maintain confidence in the market.
“One thing that we need to understand is that markets are impacted by many factors be it positive or negative and one thing is about how the economy is going,” he said.
“On the economic front, things are stabilizing inflation is dropping, GDP is projected to grow higher and all that, but there are other factors. People invest for returns and it’s important that people have confidence in the market and put in their money. We’re beginning to see some returns, and movement in the indices are increasing as a result of return of some confidence in the banking sector due to the clean-up exercise,” he noted.
The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) for the first two months of this year continued to record the same bearish performance that it suffered from for much of 2018.
The two market indices, the GSE Composite Index (GSE-CI) which measures the weighted average price changes of all the equities listed on the market; and the GSE Financial Stock Index (GSE-FSI), which tracks the weighted average price changes of financial services equities has recorded continuous downward movements since the start of this year, despite optimistic forecasts by many equity analysts at the start of the year.
This has largely been attributed to the further depreciation of the cedi as well as rising interest rates on benchmark government treasuries which have favoured fixed-income investments over equities.
Ekow Afedzie believes that the confidence will be maintained as GSE also plans to improve upon its campaign for companies to list on the local bourse.
“Moving forward we need to try to get more companies to come on the market and trade. We’re enhancing our campaign with potential firms to get them listed on the market at the same time educating investors on how to handle their investments on the capital market,” he added.
