The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) is competing with itself. Following the superlative performance of the exchange last year which made it the global leader in terms of growth in 2007 and the world's best in ROI in December same year, many investors have become agitated by the recent plunge of indices at the NSE. Some analysts say the market is self-correcting, aligning itself somewhat to the view that past growth is unsustainable. But other fears that the Nigerian capital market is imploding. The following data distils the NSE trading results at both sectoral and equity levels in a comparison of the period January - April 2008 with the corresponding period last year.

While market capitalization grew by 11.74% in this period in 2008, it grew by 59.70% same period last year. In the same vein, NSE index grew marginally by 1.47% in the period in 2008 against a much more robust 42.09% growth in the period in 2007. But much more is revealed from our data on the structure of the market.