With collective declines in its indices, the Kuwait Stock Exchange ended the first quarter of 2023.. The first market index with big names and heavy companies was the most declining by about 3.6%, and the general index withdrew with it by a close percentage. Consequently, the stock market responded negatively to changes that came mostly from abroad, including the decline in oil prices and series of interest rate hikes, the latest of which was the failures of American and European banks.
And if it is normal for negative changes to be reflected in stock indexes and commodity prices, it is unusual for stocks not to interact with remarkable performance revealed by the data of listed companies in 2022, so the companies recovering from the two years of the pandemic succeeded in returning their profits from 2022 to what they were before the pandemic and better.. a sector revealed Banks reported the highest collective profits in 10 years, and the banks recommended generous distributions of cash and bonus shares.
The behavior of the trading liquidity during the first quarter was not far from the state of the indices, as the daily trading rates shrank to the limits of 40 million, and the stock exchange witnessed sessions with liquidity below 30, and sometimes less than 20, and the quarter ended, and the capital market value decreased by more than one and a half billion dinars.
Analysts expect that the second quarter of 2023 will be better than its predecessor, as the impact of global variables has eased or something has grown accustomed to them, and the series of interest rate hikes has calmed down from a rush.
