Kathmandu, August 9:

Nepal Stock Exchange Ltd (Nepse) this week scaled historic highs for three days in a row — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday before settling down at 1101.36 points on Thursday, the last trading day. Nepse gained 67.34 points to 1101.36 points from last week’s closing of 1034.02 points.

Commercial banks group — a key player in Nepse —gained the highest of 85.93 points to 1166.98 points, pushing Nepse to new highs every day as it’s the beginning of new fiscal year when they have to publish their unaudited accounts. The investors judge the company’s performance — before buying the shares — from these unaudited reports but they may have huge variation and investors might be fooled.

The equities market is going to be on a roll the next week too, hoped market watchers. The financial institutions have started to announce the bonus and rights shares, and cash dividends encouraging investors to buy shares at high prices in the secondary market. However, investors should be careful not to be fooled though the bullish trend may continue for some time.

On December 17 last year, Nepse had touched 1064.1 points.

The market opened on Sunday by adding 13.65 points to 1047.67 points from the last week’s closing of 1034.02 points. On Monday, it surged by 27.67 points to 1075.34 points, a record high since the inception of the stock market some 15 years ago.

Led by the growth in the commercial banks group’s index on Tuesday also, Nepse hit yet another record high of 1102.10 points. Similarly, on Wednesday Nepse scaled a new high of 1128.13 points. However, on Thursday, the Nepse settled down to 1101.36 points hinting at yet another record the next week. The secondary market ended in the green zone on four days of the five days trading.

The contribution of companies listed under ‘A’ category is more than the past couple of weeks’. It contributed to 71.10 per cent against last week’s 62.78 per cent to the total transactions. The sensitive index also gained 20.35 points to 295.19 points from last week’s closing of 274.84 points.

In terms of monetary value, NCC Bank (with Rs 48.95 million), Bank of Kathmandu (with Rs 37.86 points), Nepal Investment Bank (with Rs 27.52 million), Cosmic Merchant Banking and Finance (with 23.17 million) and NIC Bank (with Rs 23.12 million) are this week’s top five gainers.

NCC Bank topped the chart in terms of monetary value and number of transactions, with 224 transactions. In terms of shares traded this week Cosmic Merchant Banking and Finance topped with 2,25,000-unit of shares transacted.

Altogether, 67 companies of all the listed companies saw their shares traded

in the sole secondary market this week against last week’s 84 companies.