Our comments and expectations
External background. The S&P 500 declined 0.6% yesterday. Most of the technology sector, including Nvidia, was in the negative zone, despite the fact that it will report today after the market closes. Options suggest that after the release, there may be an up or down movement of 10.6%, which is equal to a volume of $200 billion. Walmart rose 3.2% on the back of rising profits and an agreement to buy Vizio for about $2.3 billion. The Conference Board's leading U.S. economic index fell 0.4% in January, more than expected. Inflation in Canada slowed more than forecast in January to 2.9% year-on-year. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 stopped going up, but the German DAX rose. Wages in the eurozone rose by 4.5% in the fourth quarter, the ECB said. This is less than the record 4.7% in the previous period, which calms inflation concerns. In the morning, the Hong Kong Hang Seng has been growing well on Asian stock exchanges (+2.5%), breaking through the 50-day moving average. It is reported that commercial banks in China have lowered the basic rate on 5-year loans to the maximum in history. Another interesting point was that yesterday, 2 major Chinese exchanges blocked the accounts of a large quantitative fund (quantum) Ningbo Lingjun for attempting to dump shares worth $ 360 million. Today it became known that the freeze will last for 3 days, which has reduced concerns about short sales.
The KASE index. The index continues its rally against the background of explosive growth in shares of the Bank CenterCredit, which for the second day in a row added more than 9% growth. Despite the obvious gap from other index securities, in general, the session was positive for other stocks as well, since only one Kazatomprom turned out to be in the red. As a result of investor activity, 2024 is going very positively for KASE due to growth of almost 12%. For comparison, the American S&P 500 is growing by about 4.3% this year.
Index shares. The BCC closed at session highs with a trading volume of about 160 million tenge, which is the highest since February 12, when they rose sharply to 505 million tenge. Due to this jump, securities now occupy 10.7% of the index share. At the same time, we note again that there was no bright news in the information space, which could have been the trigger for such a significant increase in securities. At the moment, quotations are about 20% more expensive than our fundamental valuation of securities conducted in December based on the results of the 3rd quarter. Shares of Halyk Bank and KEGOC also showed growth yesterday, with a result of +1.1% for both. By the way, KEGOC has almost completely recovered to the levels before the decline on January 19. At the LSE, the session was calmer for Halyk Bank and Kaspi, but Kazatomprom declined by 2.4%. This was not critical for the GDR, but at the same time, other stocks in the sector were also in the red when both URA and URNM uranium ETFs fell below their upward trend lines, which in our opinion is a negative point.
Currency. After yesterday's growth, the dollar today cannot develop success and completely break through the 50-day moving average. Tenge is strengthening by 0.5% and reaches 450 tenge.
Key market news
(=) Inflation: The government will try to calculate inflation in a new way