Activity on the Lebanese stock market improved during the third month of 2022, with volume traded rising by 26.89% to 1,544,302 shares, compared to 1,217,016 shares in February. Similarly, value traded expanded by 41.12% month-on-month to $21.53 million, from $15.26 million a month earlier. Trades mainly consisted of banking (60.80%), real estate (38.60%) and industry & trading (0.61%) stocks. The market capitalization of listed companies rose by 2.99% month-on-month to just below $10.10 billion and came in 13.53% higher than the $8.90 billion reading reported in March 2021. The monthly increase in the market capitalization mainly owes to the sizeable appreciation in the prices of heavy market capitalization-weighted stocks, namely Solidere “A” (5.66% monthly increase) and “B” (6.05% rise) shares.

On a cumulative basis, however, the number of shares changing hands on the BSE plunged by 68.41% year-on-year to around 3.49 million shares during the first quarter of 2022, with value traded also contracting by 22.72% annually to about $50.88 million. As far as trading multiples are concerned, the weighted average Price to Book Value (P/BV) multiple of listed stocks ended the third month of 2022 higher at 2.105x from 1.964x in February, noting it stood at 1.281x in the same month in 2021 at a time when the prices of Solidere “A” and “B” shares were trading at $24.00 and $23.90 respectively.

Overall, trading activity was stronger in March 2022, as evidenced by the increase in the turnover ratio (being the number of shares traded divided by total listed shares) to 0.08%, up from 0.06% in February. The turnover ratio reached 0.18% by end of the first quarter of this year, compared to 0.57% in the same period last year as investors remained on the sidelines awaiting some glimmer of hope regarding Lebanon’s reform journey.