Grafton Group Shares Jump More Than 5% in Early Trade

Grafton Group (LON: GFTU), the Dublin-headquartered builders’ merchants and distribution group, was trading at 1,017.81p by 8.44am in London on Monday, up 5.59% on the session. The stock is a member of the FTSE 350 and carries a market capitalisation of around £1.80bn, placing it within the Industrials sector’s industrial distribution grouping.

The move took the shares from a session low of 975p to a high of 1036.4p, a swing of more than 6% between the two extremes so far, a gap of more than 60p between the session’s weakest and strongest points. At 1,017.81p, the stock sits closer to the top of that range than the bottom, though the session still has most of the day left to run and the price could yet move further before the London close. The 08:44 reading is an intraday figure taken while the London session was still open, rather than a settled close.

How unusual this is

Turnover so far has been thin, with only 20,511 shares changing hands against a 20-day average of 419,399, putting the session’s early pace of trading well below its usual rate. That total works out to roughly 4.9% of the average daily volume, a small fraction of the shares that typically change hands across a full session at the Dublin-headquartered group. The picture may look different once trading builds through the rest of the day, but for now the price move has come on volume far short of what a typical session for the stock, and its £1.80bn market capitalisation, would normally show. The 419,399-share figure is itself drawn from the stock’s average across the past 20 trading sessions, giving a like-for-like baseline for a normal day’s turnover.

No confirmed reason for the move had emerged as of Monday morning.