It seems that gone are the days when we would routinely see around 300 million shares worth about 10 billion rupees traded every day. Now it’s been a long time when the share volume crossed 100 million mark. The monetary value of the traded shares barely crosses a billion rupees now.

What is the market waiting for? Is there some big change in the offing at the top governmental level of the country? Or is it just the issues like Margin Financing and how the Capital Gains Tax shall be actually levied that the market is worried about?

Today’s session, however, seems a bit different. After a very dismal session yesterday, today the KSE 100 index registered a gain of nearly 300 points. The volume still could not cross 100 million shares but the monetary value of 81 million shares that were traded stood above 4 billion rupees. Even some upper locks were seen in stocks like PSO, DGKC, PTC and TREET.

Yesterday’s gloom and today’s optimism…both are said to be related to the news regarding MTS, yes the same old margin trading thing  It seems that our market cannot thrive without leveraged trading. Although serious crises have bveen witnessed in the market due to this fondness for trading with the borrowed money, no lessons have been learned apparently.

Recently KASB Securities repeated their buy call for LOTPTA. After the second quarter result that has arrived lately, they expect this stock to be traded around 13.

And after hearing the news of the departure of US Army from Iraq, I decided to check the rate of Iraqi Dinar today. For a long time I have been seeing it at 1 Dinar = 4 paisas. Today I was amazed to know the current rate at 25000 IQD = 6800 PKR. That menas one Iraqi Dinar now equals 27 paisas. What’s going on?