When you pull up a stock on the Nigerian Exchange and see a bid of ₦24.50 and an ask of ₦25.00, you are looking at two queues. The bid is what the highest buyer right now is willing to pay. The ask is what the lowest seller right now will accept. The gap between them, the spread, is the cost of trading immediately rather than waiting. A thin order book, where that spread is wide and the volume behind each price level is small, is not a quirk of a sleepy counter. It is information, and it tells you something about how easily you can get out of a position when you need to, not just how to get in.
Stockology Blog
Insights on AI-powered stock intelligence for African markets, from the Stockology team.
Many arguments about technical indicators are not really about the indicator. They are about which of two incompatible ideas the person is using to read it: momentum, which says a move in motion tends to continue, or mean reversion, which says a move away from the average tends to snap back. The confusion that readers report with RSI, moving averages or volume spikes often comes from applying both ideas to the same chart without noticing the switch.
Average True Range measures how far a stock moves in a day, not which way it moves. That distinction matters: ATR is a volatility reading, not a trading signal. ATR tells you the size of a stock's typical swing. What you do with that information is a separate question.
A single candle on a chart shows you four numbers: the open, the high, the low and the close. That is all it shows. It does not tell you why the price moved, who was buying, or whether the move will continue. Treating one candle's shape as a signal on its own is closer to reading tea leaves than to reading a market, and the shape only starts to mean something once you put volume and the surrounding trend next to it.
Settlement is the point at which a trade stops being a promise and becomes a fact: cash moves to the seller, shares move to the buyer, and the exchange's record of who owns what is updated. The gap between trade date and that final exchange of value is the settlement cycle, and in Nigeria that gap has now shrunk twice in under a year. My view is that this matters more for active traders than for buy-and-hold investors, because it changes how fast money and shares actually become usable again after a trade.
It is tempting to read a touch of the upper Bollinger Band as "overbought" and a touch of the lower band as "oversold". That reading treats the bands as a directional signal. They are not built for that job. They are built to measure how much a price is moving, not which way it is going next.
Market capitalisation is a company's current share price multiplied by its total number of shares outstanding. That is the whole formula. It tells you the value the market is putting on a company's equity at that exact moment, nothing more.
It's easy to assume the Nigerian Exchange runs like one continuous block from the opening bell to the closing bell. It doesn't. NGX's trading day, which now runs from 9:00am to 4:00pm, is built from several distinct phases, not one long session, and the phase that sets the number reported as "today's close" is not the last trade of the day. Ignore that phase and you are missing the part of the session that actually sets the reference price used for indices and portfolio valuations the next morning.
The Central Bank of Nigeria just cut its benchmark rate by 350 basis points, from 26.5% to 23%, and called it a reset rather than a cut. The number matters more than the label. This is the biggest single move in the Monetary Policy Rate since 2006, according to Nairametrics, and whatever word the CBN prefers, ordinary borrowers and savers are looking at a genuinely different interest rate environment than they were three weeks ago.