Trading activities on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) continued to record positive activities in the month of May despite the uncertainties surrounding the outbreak of the novel COVID-19 pandemic which has disrupted many global markets and economies.

With investors reacting differently on both the equity and bond markets of the GSE, trading activities picked up in the month under review with 147 per cent increase over the trades recorded at the end of April last year.

The shares traded as of the end of May were 72,618,971 compared with 29,372,476 shares traded at the end of April of the same year.

Total value increased by 114 per cent to end May 2020 with GH¢47.825 million as against GH¢22.354 million recorded at the end of April 2020.

The daily average value recorded in May was GH¢2.517 million compared to GH¢1.117 million recorded in April.

Total volume traded

Total traded stocks between January to May was 201,504,907 shares valued at GH¢147,024,696.05. This represents a 135 per cent and 73 per cent increase respectively over volume and value traded for the same period in 2019.

The GSE Composite index, a collection of a great many equities, other securities, or other indexes that are averaged together to represent overall market or sector performance, at the end of May 2020 recorded a decline of -14.01 per cent, year to date (YTD), compared to the -8.74 per cent (YTD) recorded at the end of April 2020.

The phenomenon was due to selling pressure from investors on the market.

Top five volume of stocks

The top five volume of stocks traded were MTN Ghana with 188,381,392 while CalBank (CAL) was 3,422,624 and Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI) with 1,910,027. The others are Ecobank Ghana (EGL) with 1,389,555 and Aluworks (ALW) at 1,197,862.

Top five value of stocks

MTN Ghana led the top five in terms of the value of stocks traded with GH¢121,630,336.6; followed by EGH with GH¢7,681,211.59; Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) GH¢5,219,371.46; Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) GH¢5,084,297.64 and CAL GH¢2,940,235.26.

Fixed income market

The volume of securities traded for the month of May went up by 298 million from the April figure of 188.3 million.

A total volume of 8,889,357.142 securities were traded at a value of GH¢9,198,499,234.

The total cumulative trades executed on the fixed income market from January to May this year stood at 40,485,145.499. This represents a 50 per cent increase over the same period in 2019 and 73 per cent at the entire 2019 trade volume. Liquidity of the market also increased to 32 per cent at the end of May from 26 per cent in April, this year.

Top five securities traded

The top five securities trade for the period under review were all issued by the Government of Ghana. They ranged between two and 10-year bonds.

For instance, for the two-year bond, the volume trade was 969,296,001 at an interest rate of 15.78 per cent. The number of trades for that was 1,536.

The volume trade for three-year bond stood at 2,571,258,449 at 13.04 per cent interest rate while the number of trades for that same bond stood at 1,933.

For the five-year bond the volume of trade stood at 2,571,258,449 at 16.08 per cent interest rate with 1,821 for the number of trades.

The six-year bond attracted 741,096,640 in volume of trade at an interest rate of 20.20 per cent with just 95 number of trades. The volume of trade for the 10-year bond was at 1,125,352,866 at an interest rate of 20.56 per cent and the number of trades attracted was 359.