The sale of treasury bills by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, via Open Market Operations, OMO, suffered a snag last week Thursday as most investors stayed back from the exercise.
The apex bank recorded an abysmal sale of N41 billion of the N300 billion worth of the OMO bills offered for sale.
Out of the N50 billion offered for the 112-day bill, the CBN could only net 60 million at 11.05 percent, while it sold N40.89 billion from the N250 billion worth of the 182-day instrument at 12.15 percent.
At the close of transactions, the T-bills market traded with mixed sentiments with yields closing lower. Meanwhile, the money market rates dropped on Thursday with the overnight rate closing at 13.71 percent from 24.67 percent in the previous session.
Also, the Open Buy Back (OBB) rate went down to 13.33 percent yesterday from 23.33 percent in the last session.
According to analysts at Zedcrest Research, this came on the back of inflows from OMO T-bills and Net PMA repayments of about N296 billion, which helped bolster system liquidity to a net positive position of about N180 billion positive.
“We expect rates to maintain a downtrend tomorrow, as there are no significant outflows expected,” the investment research outfit stated.
