Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) last week dropped marginally by 4.16 points to close at 1,314.55 points, as investors remain unconvinced about the market and rushed to offload their shares.

After a rise in selling pressure, the average daily turnover stood at Rs1 billion, up from Rs989.86 million.

The secondary market opened at 1,318.71 points on Sunday, slipped 1.87 points to close at 1,316.84 points. On Monday too, the market fell 9.13 points before picking up 4.43 points and 7.49 points on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. On Thursday, NEPSE dropped 5.08 points.

Eventually, the market declined by 0.31 percent over the review period.

Stock analysts attributed the short-term investors’ rush to offload their stocks behind the slight fall in the NEPSE index. “The fall revealed that investors are yet to regain the confidence which they lost with the long-term bear trend which persisted at the secondary market,” said a stockbroker on request of not disclosing their identity.

The sensitive index that measures the performance of blue chips companies also went down 1.06 points to close at 280.38 points after majority of the groups including commercial banks that hold major shares in market capitalisation landed in the red.  

With share prices falling, investors lost Rs4.68 billion from the transaction, as the market capitalisation dropped to Rs1,632.11 billion from Rs1,636.79 billion.

Of the 11 sub-groups, indices of eight groups declined last week. Non-life insurance witnessed the largest downswing of 135.57 points to close at 5,894.23 points.

Index of life insurance also recorded a triple digit loss of 104.11 points. Manufacturing lost 70.8 points, microfinance lost 19.46 points and development bank lost 12.25 points. Likewise, index of commercial banks went down by 9.77 points, finance companies by 7.09 points and trading by 5.83 points. Of the three gainers, hydropower added 88.07 points, the largest of all, while hotels and ‘others’ gained 73.88 points and 12.61 points respectively.

Last week, stocks worth Rs5.02 billion were traded which was 1.62 percent more than the previous week. The total number of traded shares also increased to 16,156,438 units from 15,263,749 units.