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Profit-taking returned to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), with the benchmark KSE-100 Index shedding nearly 1,200 points during the final hours of trading on Wednesday. At 2:45pm, the benchmark index was hovering at 158,923.13, a decrease of 1,177.89 points or 0.74%. Seeling pressure was observed in key sectors, including automobile assemblies, commercial banks, oil and gas exploration companies, OMCs, power generation, and refinery. Index-heavy stocks, including HUBCO, ARL, MARI, POL, PSO and SSGC, traded in the red. On Tuesday, PSX witnessed a sharp and broad-based sell-off as heavy institutional offloading and profit-taking drove the index into a steep decline. The KSE-100 Index plunged by 2,062.78 points, or 1.27%, to close at 160,101.03. Internationally, Asian shares got a lift from Wall Street on Wednesday thanks to a fresh wave of optimism over artificial intelligence, as investors braced for a busy day headlined by the Federal Reserve’s decision and earnings from technology heavyweights. The prospect of lower US rates this week supported bonds, while the dollar sustained losses as investors bet Wednesday’s expected Fed cut would not be the last for the year. Overnight, Wall Street closed at record highs after upbeat news from Nvidia and Microsoft, with the former announcing $500 billion in bookings for its AI chips and that it would build seven supercomputers for the US Department of Energy. Microsoft meanwhile reached a deal allowing OpenAI to restructure into a public benefit corporation while giving the software giant a stake of 27% in the ChatGPT maker. That helped propel stocks in Asia higher, with MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rising 0.16% while Japan’s Nikkei jumped more than 1% to hit another record. South Korea’s Kospi similarly scaled an all-time high, helped by strong earnings and a bullish outlook from SK Hynix, an Nvidia supplier. This is an intra-day update
