The KSE-100 closed Tuesday at 169,392.32, up 1,421.66 points (PSX).
Four sessions
| Session | Close | Change | |—|—|—| | Thursday 10 Sept | 168,865.04 | -3,078.55 | | Friday 11 Sept | 170,511.86 | +1,646.81 | | Monday 14 Sept | 167,970.66 | -2,541.20 | | Tuesday 15 Sept | 169,392.32 | +1,421.66 |
Tuesday recovered a little over half of Monday’s fall. Across the four sessions the index is down about 1,119 points on balance, having travelled roughly 8,700 points to get there.
Gold
Gold now stands at Rs449,336 a tola, down Rs4,000. Ten grams fell Rs3,429 to Rs385,233, silver to Rs6,802, and the international price $40 to $4,268 an ounce.
The ten-gram figure is consistent with the tola rate, and the fall reconciles exactly against Tuesday’s Rs453,336.
A warning about gold figures this morning
Several rate aggregators were publishing sharply different numbers today — one showing about Rs459,000, another Rs449,800, another Rs443,385. The figure above is the All Pakistan Gems and Jewellers Sarafa Association rate as carried by outlets that name it, and it is the only one that reconciles with both the previous session and the ten-gram price.
Readers checking gold online should note which association a site is quoting, and whether its number survives that arithmetic.
Wednesday, and the caveat
At 12:38pm on Wednesday the index was at 168,784.81, down 607.51 points, with turnover of 61.66 million shares. That is intraday, not a close.
Selling was reported in automobiles, cement, commercial banks, and oil exploration and marketing companies, as oil retreated on an unexpectedly large build in US crude inventories.
The oil turn, if it holds
A fall in crude would be the first genuinely good news for Pakistan in this sequence. Petrol has risen Rs38.47 a litre since 7 September on the way up; the test of the daily pricing mechanism is whether it delivers the way down at the same speed.
What is not established
Wednesday’s close will not be known until after the bell. Whether the US inventory build reverses the trend or is a single data point against continuing supply disruption is not yet determinable.
[Image: Reuters/File via The Express Tribune]
