Staff Reporter
Karachi
The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) endured a tumultuous session on Tuesday. The discovery of a new variant of Covid-19 in Pakistan dented investors’ sentiment and pulled the benchmark KSE-100 index down by 392 points.
During the trading session at the stock market, the country confirmed three cases of the new Coronavirus variant, recently detected in the United Kingdom, among returnees from the European nation. Earlier, trading began with a spike and the index maintained the momentum till midday. However, shortly afterwards, the news of discovery of Covid-19 variant in Karachi broke out and at that point, panic selling emerged as investors offloaded stocks in haste. The selling spree caused a steep decline in the market and it closed the day in negative territory.
At close, the benchmark KSE-100 index recorded a decrease of 392.01 points, or 0.9%, to settle at 43,282.27 points. Overall, trading volumes rose to 503.1 million shares compared with Monday’s tally of 463.4 million. The value of shares traded during the day was Rs20.96 billion.
