Kathmandu, May 20 :

After three weeks of continuous growth, share trading at the Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) suffered a loss this week. Albeit marginally, the Nepse index dropped by 1.78 points against the last week’s impressive growth of 13.02 points.

Weekly share trading at the country’s sole secondary market opened with its index at 385.89 points on Sunday and went down to close at 384.11 points on Thursday, the last day of the trading under a regular lot.

Due to weak performance of commercial banks group the overall Nepse index declined. However, manufacturing, insurance and finance groups showed a steady growth.

According to Nepse, a total of 255,839 units of shares valued at Rs 152,717,592 were traded through 2,270 transactions during the week. Last week, a total of 391,864 units of shares changed hands generating a turnover of Rs 188,255,901 from 2,404 transactions. The report shows that the index of commercial banks group, which is the largest scrip by volume at Nepse, declined by 3.563 points. The Nepse index of the group that opened at 445.80 points on Sunday dropped to 442.37 points.

Out of the 62 listed companies, only 43 companies saw their transaction this week.

On the other hand, the manufacturing group’s index maintained a growth of 2.53 points. It climbed up to 292.34 points on Thursday from the opening 289.81 points on Sunday.

Similarly, the finance and insurance groups’ indices also posted a growth by 0.79 points and 3.58 points respectively.

The trading, hotel, other and the development banks groups, meanwhile, saw no changes in their respective indices and remained constant throughout the week. Out of the total transactions that took place, the commercial banks group continued to dominate the Nepse floor by capturing a lion share. It corne-red 95.72 per cent of the total tra-nsaction. The shares of finance group had 1.95 per cent, while the development bank group had 1.17 per cent, followed by the insurance group with 1.05 per cent and the manufacturing group with 0.05 per cent share.

In terms of the maximum number of transactions, traded share number and monetary value, Siddhartha Bank Ltd topped the list. The bank outshone all the other companies and registered a trading of 69,420 shares at Rs 25,890,240 through 971 transactions during the week.

The floor remained open for five days, where the shares of Nepal Investment Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Himalayan Bank, Nepal SBI Bank, Nepal Bangladesh Bank, Everest Bank, Bank of Kathmandu, NIC Bank, Kumari Bank, Lumbini Bank, and Siddhartha Bank were traded throughout the week.