Activity on the Lebanese stock market continued its upturn during the eighth month of 2024 with volume traded increasing by 4.17% month-on-month to 960,183 shares, compared to 921,760 shares in July and value traded rising by 31.76% to $60.61 million, from around $46.00 million a month earlier. Trades mainly consisted of real estate stocks (78.05% of total number of shares traded) followed by banking (21.01%) and industry & trading (0.94%) stocks. The market capitalization of listed companies rose by 3.46% in August to $19.24 billion and came in 2.79% higher year-on-year when compared to the $18.72 billion reading reported in August 2023. The monthly increase in the market capitalization owes to the appreciation in the prices of heavy market capitalization-weighted stocks, namely Bank Audi GDRs (14.29% monthly increase), Bank Audi listed shares (10.32% monthly rise), BLOM Bank GDRs (5.83% monthly increase), Solidere “B” shares (4.94% monthly rise), Solidere “A” shares (2.68% monthly increase), altogether outweighing the drop in the price of Byblos Bank listed shares (4.55% monthly decrease).

On an annual basis, the number of shares changing hands on the BSE fell by 76.13% in the first eight months of 2024 to 7.52 million shares while the value of shares traded increased by 12.70% to $350.68 million. As far as trading multiples are concerned, the weighted average Price to Book Value (P/BV) multiple of listed stocks ended the last trading day of August higher at 6.872x up from 6.651x in July, noting that it stood at 6.157x in August 2023 at a time when the prices of heavy market-cap weighted Solidere “A” and “B” shares were trading at $78.95 and $77.45 respectively, compared to closing prices of $84.15 for Solidere “A” shares and $85.00 for “Solidere “B” shares as at end of August 2024.

Overall, trading dynamics were somehow flat in August as portrayed by the turnover ratio (being the number of shares traded divided by total listed shares) which remained constant at 0.05%. The turnover ratio, however, decreased to 0.38% during the first eight months of this year, compared to 1.60% in the same period last year.