Movers

A percentage move is not the same as a market moving. The biggest gainer on a given day is very often the least liquid name on the board: one small order against a thin order book prints a double-digit move. That is why turnover sits next to every percentage here, and why the strip above ranks by money rather than by percent. Read them together — the name at the top of one is rarely the name at the top of the other.

Gainers and losers are ranked over listings with a reported volume above zero and a non-zero move. A listing that reports no volume figure at all is excluded from those two lists entirely: we cannot tell whether it stood still or simply was not reported, and guessing between the two is the one thing this page must not do. Most traded and Largest rank the whole board, so a name in either may not have traded — the turnover column says so where that is the case.

Turnover is shares traded times price, converted to dollars, so listings quoted in rand and in Egyptian pounds sit on one scale. “Thin” marks turnover under $10K — our own threshold, not the market’s, below which a large percentage move can be a single trade. The same threshold and the same word are used on how to buy.

Trend draws the newest closes we hold — at most 30, and none at all below 8. What stands behind a line varies: Johannesburg's and Cairo's feeds supply about a year of weekly closes, while the four markets whose returns we compute ourselves rest on the closing prices we record, so their lines are only as long as that record. A handful of series also stop well before this snapshot. So each line is captioned with the dates it actually covers and marked stale where it ends more than a month back. Two sparklines on this page are frequently not the same window, and are never rebased against each other.

Percentages are local-currency returns. Year-to-date returns run to the listing's latest close, and are withheld when that close is more than three trading sessions behind the price shown. On Lagos they are measured from the 2025 close the Nigerian Exchange published, and left out where the number of shares has changed since, as a bonus or rights issue changes it. A gain in a currency that fell against the dollar is not the same gain to a dollar investor; Africa vs World carries the currency-adjusted view, and Methodology sets out what each source supplies.