The country’s investors passed a tough year to make profit from the stock market as major indices mostly saw decline throughout the outgoing year.
Experts said the stocks will rebound and pass better time in 2023 as the crisis may be solved with the recovery of Bangladesh's economic indicators.
DSEX, the prime index of the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) peaked on the first month trading day of 2022 and never came close to revisiting its high point.
The DSEX declined a total of 549 points or 8.14 percent throughout the year to finish close at 6,206 points on the last day of trading of 2022.
The DS30, the blue-chip index, dropped by 337 points or 13.32 percent to close at 2,195 points at
the same time and the DSE Shariah Index (DSES) fell 72 points or 5.05 percent to end at 1,358 points.
Prof Abu Ahmed, eminent economist and former chairman of the economics department at the University of Dhaka, said the capital market witnessed a falling trend throughout the year amid the gloomy economic scenario and higher inflation.
“Stocks will also face a different challenges as there is an anticipation that the interest rates and inflation will spike further. There is no immediate tonic for the current depressed market if the economic situation stays as it is and the price restriction is not withdrawn for all listed securities, he added.
M Shaifur Rahman Mazumdar, managing director of the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), said the stock market passed a bearish trend in 2022 due to the worldwide economic crisis stemming from the war between Russia and Ukraine.
He expects the market will pass better days in 2023 as the crisis may be solved with the recovery of Bangladesh's economic indicators.
He mentioned the DSE is going to launch an alternative trading board in the first month of the upcoming year to enhance the capacity of mobile trading and set an independent order management system for the bond market, which will influence the stock market positively.
However, turnover of the DSE fell by about 35 percent to stand at Tk 960 crore, according to DSE data.
In 2022, through the listing of 250 government securities with a market capitalization of Tk 3,140,143.27 million on the trading platform of DSE, the market capitalization stood at Tk 7,725,144 million.
At the end of the year, the market capitalization stood at Tk 7,609,368 million.
Stock market analysts blame the floor price for lowering the turnover as most stocks remained untraded even if the stock did not drop as buyers considered the prices to be artificially high.
At the end of last July, the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) set the floor price of every stock to halt the freefall of market indices amid global economic uncertainties.
The floor price was the average of the closing prices on July 28 this year and the preceding four days.
A significant event in the year was the move to make treasury bonds tradable in the secondary market.
With that, 250 treasury bonds worth Tk 316,808 crore of market capitalisation become a new product for investors.
The alternative trading board is going to effective from next month and so, the BSEC has already approved the first-ever exchange traded funds that would be traded on the board.
In the year 2021, the number of small-and-medium (SME) companies listed with the SME board was 6 and later increased to 15 in 2022.
The six companies that got listed with the DSE's main board this year raised funds of Tk 713 crore. Apart from these, a perpetual bond and mutual fund also raised funds of Tk 475 crore collectively.
In the previous year, 19 companies had raised funds of Tk 1,858 crore in total, the data shows.
At the end of 2022, the price-earnings ratio of the market stood at 14.08 with the lowest ratio belonging to the banking sector with 7.73.
