Activity on the Lebanese stock market fell during the second month of the year 2020, despite a block trade involving some 32,760 “RYMCO Class B” shares. In this vein, volume traded on the BSE dropped by 89.39% to 1,729,973 shares during the month of February 2020, down from 16,307,968 shares a month earlier. Conversely, value traded skyrocketed by 452.80% month-on-month to $11.32 million, from $2.05 million in January 2020. Trades mainly consisted of real estate stocks, which represented 70.40% of the total traded volume, followed by banking stocks (27.71%) and industry & trading stocks (1.89%). The Beirut Stock Exchange’s market capitalization contracted to around $6.24 billion in the second month of the current year, from nearly $6.97 billion in the previous month, and remained much lower than the circa $9.34 billion reading recorded in February of last year.

On a cumulative basis, the number of shares changing hands on the BSE plunged by 89.57% year-on-year to just below 18.04 million shares during the first two months of the current year, with value traded sinking by 98.15% annually to about $13.37 million. As far as trading multiples are concerned, the weighted average Price to Book Value (P/BV) multiple of listed stocks ended the second month of 2020 lower at 0.532x, compared to 0.554x in January 2020, and remained significantly lower than the 0.655x reading of February 2019, owing to the sharp drop in the prices of listed stocks amid the economic and political uncertainties.

Overall, trading activity was weaker during the month of February 2020, as evidenced by the decrease in the turnover ratio (being the number of shares traded divided by total listed shares) to 0.10%, down from 0.93% in January 2020. The turnover ratio also depreciated on a cumulative basis to reach 1.03% by end of February 2020, compared to 9.84% a year before.