KARACHI - The countless small and medium investors at stock markets have suffered billions of rupees losses during the last fifteen trading days, including the two last trading days of this week as the market took deep dips in the wake of economic crisis, rupee depreciation, imposition of CGT, latest moves of State Bank and political chaos in the country. From Friday 2, to Friday 23 the KSE-100 index had shed 1,933 points causing enormous financial losses to the day traders and jobbers, brokers told The Nation on Friday. While in two last trading days of this week the benchmark index of KSE has lost 962 points. In the last fifteen trading days the market capitalization has declined by Rs581 billion and Rs187 billion in the last two trading days of this week. "We expect a difficult period ahead as the measures taken by the SBP will be extremely negative for banks and all leveraged sectors. However, as the currency market recovers and gains some stability we expect some sanity to be restored on the equity front," Maheen Rahman research head of BMA capital said. Interesting to note is that on May 12, the KSE-100 index had taken a dip of 200 points but the reports of the resignations of the PML (N) minister from the federal cabinet had changed the sentiment of the stock market and the KSE-100 index closed with a gain of 56 points. The sudden upward surge of benchmark index was attributed mainly to the efforts of two main players of stock market, who had jacked up the chief index of the stock market and left the impression that KSE-1ndex will continue its upward surge in coming days over the resignation of Ishaq Dar. On the very next day stock market had shown strong recovery and KSE-100 index went up by around 250 points but during the last eight trading sessions prior to such strong recovery the KSE-100 index had lost 1,252 points, which prompted the small and medium investors to give up their positions after suffering heavy losses. Brokers said that " we were hoping positive decisions after the resignation of Ishaq Dar but our all hopes evaporated into thin air as the steps taken by the State Bank and the finance ministry, which affected the sentiments of the stock market," Bilal Hameed at JS Global attributed negative trend on stock market to the weak economic numbers, 150bps discount rate increase and mounting political uncertainty with rifts between the presidency and the government, caused the KSE-100 index to dive down by 9 per cent on Weak on Weak basis (1,221 points). Moreover, further development on the capital gain tax issue implying its imposition in Budget FY09 also dented market sentiments. During the week, CBR chairman suggested for the imposition of capital gain tax on shares transactions. Moreover, SECP has also proposed to implement this tax on investments held for less than 12 months. This further dampened investor sentiments for investing in the equity market, he added. The imposition of a minimum deposit rates on PLS accounts bodes negative especially for large banks since they have low cost saving accounts in their books. This caused major sell off in the banking sector and its market cap decline by 12 per cent WoW, Bilal said. With the roll over week starting Monday, the open interest to be settled currently stands at Rs23 billion. CFS investment has fallen by 16 per cent to Rs44.5billion with CFS rate jumping to 17.8 per cent.