Markets were crushed around the world Thursday and Colombia wasn’t spared. Markets here were rattled, especially as oil prices dropped more than 6.5% leading all 4 oil companies listed on the BVC to extremely poor days. Newcomer, Petrominerales took pain of 11.33% while Ecopetrol, PREC and Canacol all lost more than 4% of their value today.
Volume was heavy today at COP364.3 billion, PREC was just shy of trading COP$100 billion. This brings losses to 11.83% on the year for the Colcap index, or 13.49% in dollar terms.
2nd quarter GDP increased 5.2%. Petroleum and mining related activities had the most dramatic increase, 10.3%, in-line with what we have been seeing. Retail, restaurants and hotels jumped 7.2%, transportation and communications gained 7.1%, and financial activities 6.1%. Construction was the only sector with negative growth of 0.9%, largely due to a 7.6% decrease in civil works.
The typically non-volatile yields on TES and Yankees have been anything but the past 2 days, and a move of 28bps in 2017 Yankees rose eyebrows in markets today.
The peso continued to slide and hit 1,940 in early trading today. It bounced back to close at 1,915, a decrease of 2.19% to the dollar eclipsing recent large moves seen in the past couple weeks.