Buying rally continued at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), with the benchmark KSE-100 Index gaining nearly 1,000 points during the opening hours of trading on Thursday.
At 10:45am, the benchmark index was hovering at 119,514.7 level, an increase of 978.18 points or 0.83%.
Across-the-board buying momentum was observed in key sectors including automobile assemblers, commercial banks, fertilizer, oil and gas exploration companies, OMCs, power generation and refinery. Index-heavy stocks including NRL, HUBCO, PSO, SNGPL, MARI, OGDC, PPL, HBL, NBP and UBL traded in the green.
In a key development, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Wednesday said that it received the second tranche of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) 760 million, equivalent to $1.02 billion, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
It added that the amount will be reflected in SBP’s foreign exchange reserves for the week ending May 16th, 2025.
Moreover, the Power Division is all set to brief the IMF virtually on circular debt development, annual rebasing outlook, power sector subsidy size and composition and carbon levy legislation on May 15-16, 2025.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government has made a series of new commitments to the IMF focused on reforming Pakistan’s energy sector — including both power and gas.
On Wednesday, the PSX experienced a volatile trading day, driven by strategic profit-taking. The benchmark KSE-100 Index lost 39.36 points, or 0.03%, to close at 118,536 points
Internationally, stocks struggled for direction on Thursday while the dollar stumbled as the euphoria from market tailwinds earlier in the week fizzled out, with traders looking to US data later in the day for further catalysts.
US Treasury yields were elevated and the benchmark 10-year yield rose to a one-month top, in part due to worries over President Donald Trump’s budget package that would add trillions of dollars to the US debt.
Investors were greeted with a plethora of good news earlier this week from a US-China trade-war truce to a raft of headline-grabbing investment deals from the Middle East during Trump’s Gulf tour, in moves that breathed new life into battered global stocks.
But most of the optimism died down by Thursday, leaving MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan little changed and Wall Street futures slightly lower after notching marginal gains during the overnight cash session.
This is an intra-day update
American Dollar Exchange Rate