KATHMANDU, DECEMBER 14

The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) index, the sole secondary market of the country in a sudden surge rose by 6 per cent on Tuesday, prompting the market regulator to deploy a positive circuit breaker.

The index's rapid rise today has provided investors with some much needed respite from the market's recent slump.

Trading was suspended for the rest of the day at 1:26 pm after the benchmark index rose 6.00 per cent, or 137.18 points, to 2418.85 points on Tuesday.

The market regulator had previously paused trading for 40 minutes after the index had risen 5% in the first two hours of trade.

Trading had resumed at 1:18 p.m.

However, minutes after trading resumed, the market soared over 6%, triggering another circuit breaker and a trading suspension for the remainder of the day.

The market, which had been in a slump with the index losing 88.70 points on Sunday and 79.57 points on Monday, witnessed a dramatic increase on the third trading day of the week, with all subindices registering gains.

The development bank index led the gainers on Tuesday with 9.2 per cent rise.

Similarly, both the sensitive and float indexes increased, with the sensitive index advancing 22.72 points or 5.19 per cent to 460.31 points. The float index also increased by 9.36 points, or 5.98 per cent, to 165.90 points.

Despite the sharp increase in NEPSE, the daily turnover remained lower than the previous two days, with a total of 4,085,956 units of shares of 220 companies traded for just Rs 1.842 billion. The daily turnover was Rs 3.382 billion on Sunday and Rs 3.995 billion on Monday.