Pakistan’s stock market closed Thursday on a firm note as the KSE-100 index gained 768.66 points, or 0.46 percent, to settle at 166,186.16. The rally came on the same day parliament’s joint sitting ratified the emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and endorsed governor’s rule in the province, adopting the emergency resolution by 240 votes to 46. The coincidence was hard to miss: on Monday, the announcement of the emergency had sent the same index crashing 1,965 points.
A session of two halves
Thursday’s trade opened with strong buying across automobile assemblers, commercial banks, oil and gas exploration companies, oil marketing companies and power generation stocks. At its peak the index touched 166,877.01, up 1,459.50 points on the day, before momentum faded in afternoon trade as investors booked profits. The index slipped through the afternoon to settle at 166,186.16, still comfortably in positive territory. Index heavyweights including HUBCO, OGDCL, POL, HBL, MCB, MEBL, NBP and UBL all traded in the green.
Counting the recovery
Put the week together and the picture changes from panic to repair. Monday’s close of 165,124.41 came after a 1,964.86-point, 1.18 percent plunge that analysts at Topline Securities and Ismail Iqbal Securities tied directly to the emergency announcement. Tuesday added another 347.97 points of losses, ending at 164,776.44, before Wednesday’s 641.07-point rebound took the index to 165,417.51. From Monday’s close to Thursday’s 166,186.16, the market has now clawed back 1,061.75 points, roughly 54 percent of the ground lost in Monday’s emergency-driven selloff. That reading is PakMirror’s own: no broker has publicly declared the emergency “priced in”, and none of the sources used here name the day’s buyers.
Same day as the ratification vote
The parliamentary arithmetic landed earlier in the day. The joint sitting, chaired by National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, first suspended its rules by a 214 to 56 standing headcount and then adopted the emergency resolution 240 to 46, also endorsing governor’s rule. This piece makes no claim that the vote caused the rally; markets move on many inputs. But the timing frames the session: the same constitutional crisis that broke the market on Monday reached its parliamentary resolution on Thursday, and the index ended the day higher, not lower.
Rallying while the region fell
The gains also stood out against the global mood. Asian markets fell on Thursday after hotter-than-expected US September inflation data: the MSCI Asia-Pacific ex-Japan index dropped 1.2 percent, South Korea’s KOSPI slid 5.6 percent and Japan’s Nikkei shed 1.3 percent, while on Wall Street the S and P 500 lost 1.1 percent and the Nasdaq fell 1.9 percent. Karachi, in other words, rallied while the region sold off.
What the week leaves behind
With parliament’s ratification now on record and more than half of Monday’s losses recouped, the KSE-100 heads into Friday’s session much closer to where it stood before the week’s political shock. What happens next will depend on how the new governor’s-rule administration in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa settles in and on the broader economic picture, including the pending timeline for the $1.2 billion staff-level agreement reached with the IMF to go before the Fund’s Executive Board. For one day at least, the market chose recovery over fear.
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