JKH, Bourse’s Lone Warrior

The bourse breathed a sigh of relief at Friday’s trading on the knowledge that sanctions, at least in the immediate future will not be imposed on the island despite Thursday’s Human Rights (HR) resolution against Sri Lanka at Geneva which resulted in it returning a higher Rs. 926.9 million turnover on Friday compared to low Rs. 376.2 million and Rs. 354.1 million turnover levels shown on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.
Two days prior to the UN resolution, ie on Tuesday, a market source told this newspaper that fears of sanctions being imposed on the island due to alleged HR violations coupled with rising interest rates and a weakening exchange rate impinged on the bourse’s performance at Tuesday’s trading which saw the benchmark ASI fall by 35.44 points and the more sensitive MPI by 13.16 points on a low Rs. 627.4 million turnover.
However on Friday the indices were up by 72.63 and 67.04 points respectively, after continuously falling in the two prior days before Friday as well.
“But if you look at the success of the bourse in the past few days, it was just one stock, namely blue chip John Keells Holdings plc (JKH) that drove it up,” he said. It was even so on Friday, where some Rs. 300 million worth of shares of this blue chip company was picked up by foreigners, the source said.
Meanwhile last Friday (March 16) turnover in the Colombo stock market hit a near record Rs. 15.7 billion when a Malaysian fund bought Rs. 14.4 billion worth of equity (8.8% stake) of this blue chip company from state controlled EPF which saw market indices gain by 51.85 points and 30.57 points respectively. The following market day Monday (March 19), foreign funds bought a 5% stake in Aitken Spence (20 million shares at Rs. 105 a share) which boosted turnover to Rs. 3.3 billion with the ASI making a pyrrhic gain of 0.41 points, while the MPI gained 24.83 points.