The Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Sandton, Johannesburg. Picture Thinkstock
The JSE has confirmed that last Thursday was a record day of trading on the local market. Over R64 billion worth of shares were traded during the session, the highest value in a single day’s trading on record.
This was almost three times the value traded on the previous two days, which saw total trades amounting to R23.0 billion and R23.8 billion respectively. As the chart below shows, value traded on the local market only surpassed R40 billion on two other days in the whole month of September.
Source: JSE
The surge in value traded was the result of a confluence of two big deals in the market. Thursday was the final day that SABMiller shares traded locally ahead of its merger with Anheuser-Busch InBev, and on the same day GlaxoSmithKline disposed of the final part of its stake in Aspen Pharmacare.
Aspen was the day’s most traded company, with just over 57 million of the company’s shares changing hands. The overall value of these shares was R17.3 billion, or 26.9% of the total traded on the market.
The value of the trades in SABMiller’s stock reached just over R12.6 billion in the session. This was just under a fifth of all market activity.
As the table below shows, no other company accounted for even half as much:
Source: JSE
The unusually high volume in Impala shares was largely as a result of the companymoving into the Top 40 in SABMiller’s place. The brewer dropped out of the index at the close of trade, and index trackers had to re-balance their portfolios immediately.
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