The NGX Is Up 430 Per Cent In Three Years. Ask What That Actually Measures.
Nigerian market capitalisation has gone from about N30 trillion in 2023 to N160 trillion in 2026, making the exchange one of the world's best performers. Some of that is growth and some of it is arithmetic.
The Nigerian Exchange has been one of the best-performing stock markets in the world in 2026. Total market capitalisation of listed companies has risen more than 430 per cent in three years, from around N30 trillion in 2023 to about N160 trillion.
That is a genuinely striking number and it requires careful reading.
The currency question
Those figures are in naira. Over the same period the naira has been substantially devalued, and now trades around N1,350 to the dollar against a very different rate in 2023.
A market capitalisation measured in a currency that has lost a large share of its external value will rise in local terms even if nothing underlying has changed. Any honest assessment of the NGX's performance has to separate genuine appreciation from the arithmetic of devaluation.
Measured in dollars, the picture is considerably more modest than 430 per cent suggests.
What is genuinely real
Several things, and they should not be dismissed.
Nigerian listed companies with dollar revenues or dollar-linked pricing have seen real earnings growth in naira terms. Banks have benefited from higher interest rates and from foreign exchange revaluation gains. Investor confidence in the market's basic functioning, particularly the ability to repatriate, has improved from a very low base.
There is also a substitution effect: with domestic inflation high, equities become a more attractive store of value than cash for Nigerians with savings to protect, which supports prices independent of company fundamentals.
The thing to watch
Whether the rally survives contact with the election. Nigerian markets have historically softened through election periods and recovered afterwards, and there is no obvious reason this cycle would differ.
A market that has run this hard for three years, into a January vote, with a very large IPO scheduled for October, has a busy autumn ahead.
Sources: BusinessDay; Nairametrics; Vanguard.
Nigerian business journalism has a problem it has not adjusted to, which is that after a large devaluation almost every naira-denominated figure sets a record every year regardless of underlying performance.
Record market capitalisation. Record revenue. Record profit. Record box office. Record transfer fee. Record prize money. All technically true, all substantially inflated by the denominator changing.
This is not a small distortion. When a currency loses a large share of its value, a company can report enormous naira growth while producing and selling less than it did before.
The fix is simple and almost nobody does it: report the dollar figure alongside, or report volume rather than value. How many barrels, how many units, how many tickets, how many customers.
Until that becomes standard, Nigerian readers are going to keep being told that everything is at a record high while their own experience tells them the opposite, and the gap between those two things is corrosive to public trust in economic reporting generally.
