Profit-taking tames peso, local stocks market

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MANILA (PNA) — Profit-taking resulted to a sideways close for the Philippine peso at P43.71 Monday after ending last week at its nearly six-month high of P43.65 buoyed by further upgrade of the country’s investment grade rating from Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Thursday.

The debt watcher hiked by a notch to “BBB” with stable outlook from “BBB-” its ratings on the country Thursday last year or a year after giving the country an investment grade rating.

Further upgrade of the investment grade rating was made after the credit rating agency noted the sustainability of current government reforms even into the next administration

For this week, the peso opened even better at P43.67 from P43.90 start in the previous trading.

It failed to strengthen during the day after investors decided to take profit. It even weakened to P43.78 mid-trade.

This brought the day’s average to P43.72, still better than the P43.77 at the end of last week.

Volume of trade reached US$ 863.8 million, lower than the US$ 1.04 billion in the previous trading.

For this week, the peso is projected to be on depreciation mode after closing strong for the past several days.

For Tuesday, the local unit is expected to trade between P43.50 and P44.00.

Relatively, profit-taking also affected the local bourse Monday resulting to a drop of 0.52 percent or 35.92 points to end the day at 6,811.34 points.

A trader said profit-taking was the culprit for the local stock market’s Monday performance, which was also partly traced to negative developments overseas.

Most of the sub-indices tracked the main index except for the industrial and holding firms.

Volume of trade reached 1.14 billion amounting to P8.02 billion.

Gainers led losers at 89 to 86 while 46 were unchanged.