Warsaw Stock Exchange: Golden Opportunities Amidst the Noise and Panic Trading

Like the rest of Central and Eastern Europe and the whole world, Poland has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the negative impact of the war in Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis.

Interestingly, panic buying and visible spikes are evident in some of the most important sectors of the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE), such as Financial and Insurance (F&I), as well as Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The latter sector has been affected by a delayed impact due to Allegro (ALE), the Polish e-commerce platform that only entered the stock exchange in October 2020. The chart below looks at the average number of transactions per session.

It's worth mentioning an outlier that overshadowed any other changes in the most active sectors, which was Serinus Energy. The company saw a growth of over 300% in average trading volume per session in the first quarter of 2021, following very promising news regarding gas flow testing in Romania.

The company caught the eye of institutional investors in charge of emerging markets, and subsequently Richard Sneller became the largest shareholder in the company. Please follow the link below to access the interactive chart that shows the changes in trading activity across sectors.

Note that the WSE data included in this analysis were extracted for the top 90 companies based on their turnover value between Q1 2019 and Q1 2023.