Invest Lobby

Selling pressure comes in on Thursday after the market stays sideways most of the time last week. On Thursday itself, the FBMKLCI shed 16.67 points or 1.1%, the largest decline in four months, to settle at 1,458.08 points Thursday. On a week to week basis, the benchmark index declined 14.87 points or 1% and traded between 1,456.64 and 1,479.59 points. Investors took a breather and try to figure out whether the recent Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) aimed to boost the local economy to achieve developed nation status by 2020 revealed by the Prime Minister will be able to further lift up market confidence. Trading volume was much higher than the previous weeks. The daily average trading volume was 1,100 million shares compared to 815 million shares in the previous week.

Word has been going around about the economic transformation programme revealed last week since last month. The Malaysian equity market beat the generally bearish trend in regional markets last month and stocks which are speculated to benefit from the programme like MRCB, Maybank, Gamuda, YTL, CIMB, WCT and others stock prices have increased significantly in the past one month. Therefore, the ETP agenda may have been discounted in the bullish rally. However, with RM1 trillion in the pipeline for the next 10 years, the current bullish rally is just a small rally and if implemented well, we may expect equity market to reach greater heights. The question, as always, is the implementation. I do not want to think that far at this moment and just concentrate on looking for trading opportunities on whatever information available now.

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