Reeling from coronavirus: Foreigners pull out over $73 million from PSX

Analyst expects selling to continue even if virus-affected global economy recovers

KARACHI: After a gap of around four-years, foreign investors gradually staged a comeback at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) in the past one year or so until February 2020. However, this came to an end as investors failed to prolong their stay and opted to pull out of the market following outbreak of the coronavirus, which now threatened to become a pandemic.

Even if the virus-affected global economy manages to rebound by end of the current year or the beginning of the next year, foreign investors are expected to remain net seller of shares at the local bourse for several months or even a year’s time.

“When the global economy will start recovering and it reflects at the global stock markets, foreign investors will first try to invest at developed markets which have overreacted to the coronavirus outbreak compared to emerging (including PSX) and frontier markets,” Topline Securities Director Research Syed Atif Zafar said while talking to The Express Tribune.

The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the other day that the global economy may slow down sharply this year as governments around the world try to contain the virus epidemic and anticipated a rebound in growth from 2021.

“The return of Pakistan (PSX) into the global MSCI Emerging Market (EM) Index in May 2017 has so far not proved worthwhile since its weightage (0.02%) in the index remains negligible,” the analyst said.

After a gap of around four years, foreigners had invested a net $58.6 million in shares at PSX from the beginning of calendar year 2019 till the end of January 2020, according to National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited (NCCPL).

However, they withdrew in the past one month more than what they had poured in the prior 13 months (Jan 2019 to Jan 2020).

They pulled out net $73.09 million from February 1 to March 6. Earlier, they had sold stocks worth net $1.7 billion in the prior four years (January 2015 to December 2018), according to the NCCPL.

“Foreigners may be holding stocks worth around $5-6 billion or some 30% of the free-float volume of shares at the PSX these days,” Zafar estimated.

“The foreign investment was estimated to peak around $8-9 billion in the recent past. PSX recorded significant foreign buying during the years when it was placed in MSCI frontier markets (2008-2017) due to its notable weightage in the index,” he said.

Pakistan’s stock market may resume uptrend in the months ahead as the market participants are anticipating the first cut in the benchmark interest rate either this month (March) or in May 2020, he added.

Currently, the rate stands at an eight-year high of 13.25% since July 2019.

People usually do not invest in stocks at times when the benchmark interest rate stands high because investing in stocks become infeasible. During these times, people usually invest in government debt securities because such investment are risk-free and ensure comparatively higher return.

However, low interest rate encourages people to take bets at the stock market in a bid to earn comparatively higher profit, it was learnt.

Despite huge foreign sale in the four years (2015-18), the PSX benchmark KSE-100 index managed to hit an all-time high of nearly 53,000 points in May 2017. The market saw the peak on expectation that foreign investors would stage a strong comeback along with return of Pakistan to MSCI Emerging Market Index in the month.

On the contrary, the PSX fell to a five-year low in August 2019 and traded below 29,000 points, however, the index managed to rebound to 1.5-year high of over 43,000 points in January 2020.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2020.

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