Yesterday presented many an investor at the Nairobi Securities Exchange had a chance to bag a few notes since both major indices performed better. The 20-share is a list of the top 20 companies by market capitalization among the publicly listed companies. Such are what attracts foreigners as a better performance translates to huge gains for them. They do after all, make sizeable investments. The 20-share index closed at 4171.87 points, up by 13.49 and the All-share index closed at 93.13 points, up 0.54.

We shall direct our attention to 2 companies and allocate ourselves 1000 shares for each. We shall calculate exact gains/loss from the day’s trading:

• British American Tobacco (BAT) – Barely a fortnight ago, the stock was trading at KES 470. The counter gradually took a nose-dive to trade at KES 431 at the beginning of this week. Fortunately for the investors, the share price has again risen in four days to trade at KES 449. Key to note is that the company is listed among those in the 20-share index. Its market capitalization currently stands at KES 44.9 billion (directly related to current share price). This means that foreign investors have been making a killing with each price gain.
• Kenya Airways – The shareholders seem determined to keep the stock priced above KES 12. Evidently, the KES 4.8 billion profit-after-tax loss was not enough to make them think twice. It instead pushed the stock’s price up to KES 12.40, a price the counter had not seen since the beginning of the month. The airline is currently in pursuit of a way to launch low cost flights in light of the entrance of Fastjet. The latter is already providing low cost flights in Tanzania at costs averaging US $20.

Going by yesterday's prices, we have used a total of KES 470,460 calculated as follows;

(Transaction fee 2%)

• BAT                                 1000*449 = 449,00

(449,000/0.98) =KES 458,164

• Kenya Airways      1000*12.05 = 12,050

(12,050/0.98) = KES 12,296