(By LIto Gagni)
The Ukraine narrative walloped stocks early on today losing by as much as 138 points before bargain hunters came back with vengeance picking up shares that were earlier sold down to recover somewhat and finish with just 46.54 points or 0.63 percent decline to 7,372.25 points.
Market bellwether SM Investments crumpled to as low as P843 before investors bought back the stock to finish at P860, do8wn by P61 or 6.62 percent and emerging as most active stock with P1.366 billion in trades.Also sold down was Monde which crashed to as low as P15.52 , its closing price, to post a hefty loss of 15.52 percent or P54 centavos on trades of P292 million.
Jose Ricardo Garcia of Diversified Securities said that the market was spooked by the Ukraine narrative where US President Joe Biden is asserting that there is an imminent invasion that Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin is readying though the latter had said that there is no military offensive planned.
The Biden pronouncement rocked the stock market as it could be a self-fulfilling one, one market participant said, citing the supposed intelligence finding from the US sources that there is a WMD in Iraq leading to the US war in that nation that rocked the region.
SM’s huge decline as well as that of Monde led to the hefty loss in the holdings subsector by 2.38 percent and in industrials where Monde belongs ,which is down by 0.97 percent. The other loser was services, down by 1.07 percent while the gainers were financials, up by 0.02 percent, mining and oil by 1.25 percent and property by 2.14 percent.
Property firms SM Prime and Ayala Land rose respectively to P39.90, up by P1.70 and P39.70, up by 5 centavos. Solar Phiippines dropped by a huge 9.27 percent to P1.86, down by 61 centavos, emerging the second most active stock with P1.019 billion in trades. Globe and PLDT were unchanged at PP2,700 and P1,782, two of the 46 shares that were unchanged. There were 72 gainers and 125 losers with a value turnover of P9.114 billion.
