LAHORE - The equities plodded in Wednesday's session after rumours circulated in market about delay in cement plant of DG Khan Cement (DGKC) owing to some technical issues.

This led cement sector to close in red, eroding 60 points from index gain. On the other hand refineries remained in limelight during the session as Mar 2018 Furnace oil sales numbers suggest resumption of furnace oil sales in Pakistan.

Following this, Attock refinery (ATRL) and National refinery (NRL) closed at their upper caps.

Resultantly, benchmark index closed at 46,104, gaining 90 points. Fertilizer stocks, Fauji Fertilizer (FFC) and Engro Fertilizer (EFERT), gained 1.3 percent and 1 percent respectively, as urea sales during 1Q2018 is likely to post 46 percent YoY growth to 1.26mn tons.

Market started off with trading sideways, but soon gained its momentum making an intraday high of +434 to finally close the index at 46,104 levels.

Interest came in Financials where major banks such as MCB (+0.32 percent), HBL (+0.84 percent), UBL (+1.30 percent) NBP (+4.80 percent) closed positive as the Pakistan Banks Association (PBA) has proposed that banks should be paid 2 percent collection charges for performing WHT agent.

Moreover, the association also proposed no Super Tax on banking companies to FBR for the coming year. On the flip side, Cements closed in the red where DGKC (-3.57 percent), FCCL (-2.35 percent), PIOC (-1.02 percent) and LUCK (-0.83 percent) were the major laggards as profit taking was witnessed by investors in the sector, while prices further increased by Rs10/bag in the North region.

Traded volumes slightly plunged by 4 percent to 270m shares, while value traded increased to $119m. Top volume stocks in today's session were EPCL (-0.38 percent), LOTCHEM (-0.80 percent), KEL (+0.43 percent) and BOP (+0.63 percent).