Liquidity & Technical
Liquidity & Technical
Figures converted from ZAR at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates for the rate table. Ratios, margins, multiples, RSI, MACD, volatility percentages, and share counts are unitless and unchanged.
MTN trades roughly $49.5M per day on the JSE — deep enough that a $30M block is a single-week build for a fund running 20% participation. Issuer-level capacity cannot be expressed as a percentage of market cap because the share-count field is missing in the source feed. The tape is constructive: price sits 18.6% above the 200-day, the January-2025 golden cross has not reversed, and YTD is +21.9% — price action is consistent with the operating recovery rather than contradicting it.
Portfolio implementation verdict
5-day capacity at 20% ADV ($)
Supported AUM for a 5% position ($)
Supported AUM for a 2% position ($)
ADV 20d ($, value)
Technical stance score (+3 to −3)
Institutionally tradable with constructive tape. A fund up to roughly $990M AUM can hold a 5% position and clear it inside five trading days at 20% ADV participation. Trend, volatility regime, and 52-week position all line up constructive; short-term momentum is the soft spot.
Note: shares-outstanding and market-cap fields were not populated in the data feed for this run, so liquidation runway as a percentage of market cap and ADV-to-mcap turnover ratios are not reported below. USD-denominated capacity figures and supported-AUM math are intact.
Price snapshot
Last close ($)
YTD return
1-year return
52-week position (pctile)
Realized vol 30d (%)
Beta against a global benchmark is omitted — no benchmark price series was loaded for an emerging-markets EMEA telecom; realized vol stands in as the cleaner risk descriptor.
The critical chart — 10-year price with 50 / 200 SMA
Most recent regime change: golden cross on 2025-01-20 (50d crossed above 200d). The cross has held for sixteen months. Price is 18.6% above the 200-day — the trend filter is currently positive.
The shape of the lifetime chart: MTN spent 2018–2020 below $6 as Nigeria regulatory disputes weighed on the franchise, made an all-time high near $13.75 in early 2022 on the post-COVID telco rerating, gave back roughly half during 2023–2024 as African FX devalued, and has now retraced 90% of the drawdown. The current level sits within 10% of the 2022 high in dollar terms — note that part of the 2022-2024 dollar drawdown reflects ZAR weakness, not just the share-price move.
Relative strength
No benchmark or sector ETF series was loaded for an EMEA-listed wireless carrier — neither SPY nor a US-domiciled telecom basket is the right yardstick for a JSE-listed multinational that runs Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. The chart above shows MTN's absolute total-return path (+80% over three years in ZAR terms), with the trough at 60 in mid-2024 marking the African-FX bottom; relative strength versus an MSCI Emerging Markets Telecom or a JSE Top 40 proxy should be sourced separately if a strict relative read is needed.
Momentum — RSI and MACD over 18 months
RSI peaked above 80 twice in the past year — late-January 2025 after the golden cross and again in July when the recovery accelerated — and the most recent print of 50.77 is neutral. The MACD histogram flipped negative for the first time since mid-March: short-term momentum is cooling while the longer trend filter remains positive. The setup is consistent with a pause inside the broader uptrend; a confirmed roll of the trend filter (price below the 200d) is what would invalidate that read. RSI/MACD describe the texture of the next 1–3 weeks.
Volume, volatility, and sponsorship
The volume picture is consistent with the price move: weekly volume ran 1.5-2x the 50-day average across June–September 2025 as the stock broke out from $7 toward $10, and is mean-reverting toward the 6M-share-per-day baseline as price consolidates near 12-month highs. The single spike on 2026-02-19 (16M shares) aligned with the rally to $12.50 — high-volume up-days of that magnitude are typically read as institutional sponsorship.
Top 3 historical volume spikes
The 2018 cluster overlaps with the well-known Nigeria regulatory and tax disputes (CBN repatriation order; AGF tax claim), and the August 2021 spike landed on the period of Nigerian fintech / MoMo regulatory news flow — but the run did not pull catalyst notes from the research feed for this output, so the column is intentionally blank rather than inferred.
5-year realized volatility regime
Realized 30-day vol of 24.3% sits at the p20 calm boundary of the past decade. The p20 / p50 / p80 percentile bands are 24.3% / 32.9% / 42.2% — MTN is trading as quietly today as it has in the past 5 years, despite operating in markets where 40%+ vol has been the norm. Calm-and-rising is the historically more stable regime for adding exposure; a vol break paired with falling price would be the setup to watch for instead.
Institutional liquidity panel
The reader question here is direct: how much can a fund take, and how fast can it exit? USD-denominated capacity is computable from ADV alone; market-cap-relative metrics require shares-outstanding which the upstream feed left blank.
ADV and turnover
ADV 20d (shares)
ADV 20d ($, value)
ADV 60d (shares)
ADV 60d ($, value)
60d median daily range (%)
ADV-to-market-cap and annual turnover-of-float are unavailable because the share-count field is null in the source feed. The 60-day ADV is 38% higher than the 20-day ADV — the stock has de-rated on volume over the last two months, which is the natural pattern as a high-momentum name consolidates near new highs.
Fund capacity at 10% and 20% ADV participation
A $600M fund running a 5% MTN position needs to clear roughly $30M of stock — well inside the 5-day capacity at 10% participation. A $2.4B fund attempting a 2% position is also clean at 10% participation; pushing the same fund to a 5% position would require 20% participation and roughly 10 trading days. Capacity is not the constraint until fund AUM exceeds about $990M at a 5% weight (≈ $1.2B at 4%), or $490M at a 10% weight.
Liquidation runway
The issuer-level runway table cannot be computed without shares outstanding. Use the fund-capacity table above as the operative sizing framework. Cross-checking against an external market-cap quote would close this gap quickly.
The 60-day median daily range is 3.25%, which is above the 2% "elevated impact cost" threshold the methodology flags. Practically, a single-day market order of 5%+ of ADV is likely to walk through the spread by 30–50 bps — schedule executions VWAP- or POV-style rather than at-touch.
Technical scorecard and stance
Stance: Constructive on a 3- to 6-month horizon (net score +4). Trend, vol regime, and breakout volume align positively; short-term momentum cooling off is the offsetting signal, which a trend filter is designed to look through. The levels that matter:
- Upside reference: a daily close above the 52-week high of $13.17 would confirm the trend has broken into new-high territory above the 2022 ceiling.
- Downside references: a daily close below the 50-day SMA at $12.07 would damage the short-term setup; a close below the 200-day SMA at $10.49 is the level whose break would invalidate the uptrend read and turn the scorecard neutral.
Liquidity is not the binding constraint for funds up to roughly $990M AUM at a 5% weight (or about $2.4B AUM at a 2% weight). For a PM with conviction on the underlying thesis, VWAP/POV-style scale-in over 1–2 weeks fits the current tape; waiting for a pullback is also defensible if the trend filter rolls.