Kathmandu, March 1

The secondary market bull has once again proved it has more room to run as the Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) index surged by 10.76 points or 0.82 per cent to overcome the threshold of 1,320 points for the first time.

Opening at 1,315.77 points, the benchmark index was mostly northbound throughout the day and closed at 1,326.53 points, breaching the previous peak of 1,318.88 points recorded on Sunday.

Low interest rates of the banks, lack of investment avenues and the persistent bull run have attracted investors to the country’s only secondary market.

While manufacturing and trading remained constant at 1,998.78 points and 201.38 points, respectively, hotels was the only subgroup to land in the red — dipping by 0.32 per cent to 1,753.43 points.

Today’s market rally was led by insurance companies, with the subgroup surging by 3.03 per cent to 6,151.51 points. Nepal Life Insurance’s share value went up by a whopping Rs 230 to Rs 3,500, and National Life’s by Rs 49 to Rs 2,720, among others.

Comparatively, the gains witnessed by other subgroups were muted — hydropower up 0.96 per cent to 2,314.83 points; finance up 0.82 per cent to 675.08 points; banking up 0.52 per cent to 1,195.23 points; others up 0.29 per cent to 824.72 points and development banks up 0.2 per cent to 1,357.24 points.

Altogether, 1.97 million shares of 123 companies were traded through 4,043 transactions that amounted to Rs 926.23 million today. The sensitive index inched up 0.79 per cent to 285.23 points and the float index edged up 0.63 per cent to 95.48 points.