Activity on the Lebanese stock market sustained its gaining streak during the fourth month of 2022, with volume traded rising by 37.60% to 2,124,884 shares, compared to 1,544,302 shares in March. Similarly, value traded expanded by 41.03% month-on-month to $30.36 million, from $21.53 million a month earlier. Trades mainly consisted of banking (62.08%), real estate (36.65%) and industry & trading (1.27%) stocks. The market capitalization of listed companies rose by 4.90% month-on-month to just above $10.59 billion and came in 12.54% higher than the $9.41 billion reading reported in April 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” (15.87% monthly increase) and “B” (13.57% rise) shares.

On a cumulative basis, however, the number of shares changing hands on the BSE plunged by 56.69% year-on-year to around 5.62 million shares during the first four months of 2022, with value traded also contracting by 17.12% annually to about $81.24 million. As far as trading multiples are concerned, the weighted average Price to Book Value (P/BV) multiple of listed stocks ended the fourth month of 2022 higher at 2.495x from 2.105x in March, noting it stood at 1.313x in the same month in 2021 at a time when the prices of Solidere “A” and “B” shares were trading at $24.90 and $25.00 respectively.

Overall, trading activity was stronger in April 2022, as evidenced by the increase in the turnover ratio (being the number of shares traded divided by total listed shares) to 0.11%, up from 0.08% in March. The turnover ratio, however, fell to 0.28% by end of the first four months of this year, compared to 0.67% in the same period last year as investors remained on the sidelines awaiting some glimmer of hope regarding Lebanon’s reform journey.