Reuters
Egypt will lengthen trading hours on its stock exchange and reinstate pre-trading from August 7, it said in a statement, as it looks to normalise activities following the turmoil of recent years.
The trading session will be extended by 30 minutes to four-and-a-half hours, plus half an hour of pre-trading.
Share prices will be allowed to move up or down by 10% in pre-trading before being suspended in addition to the 10% permitted during regular trading, it said — still just half of the 20% limit applied before 2011. The financial regulator suspended pre-trading and imposed tighter limits on daily share price moves when the stock market was jolted by the outbreak of street protests in early 2011 that led to the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak.
More than two years of civil turmoil followed, scaring off foreign investors and tourists — key sources of income and foreign currency for the Arab world’s most populous country.
The new trading hours send a clear message that Cairo’s bourse had recovered from the events of recent years, the head of the stock exchange, Mohamed Omran, said.
Egypt delays bond sale results as short-term yields soar
Egypt delayed announcing the results of a bond auction yesterday after last week’s hike in the central bank’s benchmark rates sent yields in shorter-term debt soaring.
Egyptian treasury bill yields jumped more than 1% on Sunday, the first trading day after the central bank unexpectedly raised interest rates by 100 basis points in an attempt to hold down inflation.
The bank had announced a bond auction for 18-month bonds worth 1.5bn Egyptian pounds ($209.8mn), 3-year bonds worth 2bn and 7-year bonds worth 750mn. But results had not been announced as of 1530 GMT, after banking hours.
At the last auction of those maturities, on July 8, the average yield was 11.579% on the 18-month bond, 12.690% on the 3-year and 14.536% on the 7-year bond.
Bond and treasury-bill auctions have been cancelled or capped occasionally in the past, for example, in May the central bank delayed announcing the result of a bond auction amid rising yields, before accepting about half the volume it had offered.
“Traders anticipate much higher yields on the back of the rate hike and yesterday’s auction,” one Cairo-based trader said.
“The bonds get settled on Tuesday so they (the central bank announcement) shouldn’t be any later than tomorrow,” he said.